You in turn will be pleased to know that you don’t have to drink the Meredith Kool Aid to appreciate Product’s half-baked masterpiece. What you will need is a very broad appreciation of music and a desire to bring the furthest corners of that musical world smashing cataclysmically together.

One way of thinking of it is as an angry meeting of particularly splattery punk and sweaty funk, soul and r’n’b, or at least that’s how the band tell it. Frontman Riley Graham really talks up how inspired he is by the likes of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield and Funkadelic. Amongst the tortured screams and floods of off-key guitar shrieking, you may hear echoes of soulful angst and you’ll certainly hear sweaty and propulsive rhythms that give this punk some unusually serious direction.

Much of that you could attribute to sources that aren’t quite as disparate however. When opener Mind Control Therapy finally kicks into gear, it really moves, but the beat is as much post-punk or krautrock as anything else. Similarly, I know that Riley has been listening to weird dub producers -Sun Araw et al- but when I hear the echoing screams and the highly metallic production it pushes the sound over the line into old-school industrial: more Skinny Puppy than King Tubby.

There’s also plenty that’s psychedelic in First Wave Of Death Funk: witness the warm wash of guitar-driven psych that is the bed for Midnight Coven, before it plunges into the destructive maelstrom that recalls still more of Riley’s favourites like Comets On Fire or Les Rallizes Denudes. I think those might be a bit more on the money.

Dance Of Death comes closer to that apocalyptic meeting of muses than just about any other here. The joyous psych roar just barrels forward with an unstoppable rhythm section, tapping into the P-Funk power of Funkadelic.

The EP’s two final cuts can really be taken as one seven minute psych juggernaut. The first half, Dissection Blues is mostly a long slow and spacious jam that gets brought home in the blues-rock of Beneath The Revellers Delight, which waits a good couple of minutes, trying to fool you into thinking you’re listening to Creedence, before Graham’s screaming tears across the growing climax.

When I consider it, I’m not entirely sure how how often what Product say about their sound actually resembles how they sound. So you can add that to the list of poorly thought out things about Product. I also consider that it doesn’t matter a damn bit. The way this band work without pausing to consider what the hell they’re doing -perhaps that’s the only way it works- good golly it works though. This psych-blues-dubby-industrial-post-punk-kraut-funk spew-of-consciousness just goes the whole record with letting go of your throat and, apparently, they do it without even thinking.

- Chris Cobcroft.