1958 was a big year for Jazz albums. With the release of Go , the Hipton Hipnotes put themselves firmly on the musical atlas and set themselves up for a lifetime of confusion with their rivals, the Hipstone Hiptones. 1959 was arguably an even bigger year, except in the ways in which it wasn't, obviously, as Alton Sultan and the Returning Officers emerged from the woodwindy shadows to release their first four volumes. But it was this - their fifth and final release - that set their legacy in liquid stone. Ironically none of the original 'officers' actually returned to make this record, with bandleader Sultan forming a new ensemble consisting of members of the aforementioned Hiptones and Hipnotes, many of whom weren't themselves entirely sure which of the outfits they had previously been in. None of that was to bother Alton Sultan who bravely wielded whatever instruments he could get his hands on in front of anyone brazen enough to play along with him - and the results ...

  When Nub first collapsed onto the scene in 1995 with their self-titled debut album, they defied categorisation.  Even Professor Bertrand C. Treband, head of band categorisation at the University of Oxford Institute of Categorising famously failed to categorise the band, eventually reducing the options to 'post-post-punk' and 'pre-post-post-post punk', both of which were rejected by all four members of the power trio. By the time they released Pissinfectant , they had settled on a more defined sound that, while still essentially uncategorisable, could at least be categorised as 'not actually very good'. Not that this mattered to their legions of hardcore fans, most of whom were equally not very good at their jobs, lives or relationships. And it was to this sense of failure that Nub appealed - loudly. This second album was literally recorded in the hope that it would fare worse than the first. Tracks such as 'Mob-handed pipe jockey' and 'My invisible...