As our soggy little island slips slowly from its mooring off the coast of northern Europe to float off to foggy oblivion, the time is ripe for another Get The Blessing release. The gestation period for OC DC has been tricky, what with new labels to be joined and half the group tied up on tour with those rock minnows Radiohead and Portishead. Yet this is perhaps their strongest, most coherent album yet. While All Is Yes revelled in the shock of the new, and Bugs In Amber was richly layered and mutli-tracked, OC DC is more composed (in every sense of the word), with a surer sense of detail, that old lust for life now underwritten by a darker vision.

So although the title track kicks off with that classic Blessing sound – a stonking fuzz bass and clattering drum attack morphing into a danceably honking sax solo – we soon move into the likes of ‘American Meccano’, a quirky groove, as melancholic as it is mischievous. And it's no surprise that it features a sweet yet sigh-ful vocal from Robert Wyatt. ‘Torque’ is a song whose title reflects the band's music: tense energy generated by different elements twisting and turning against each other. While the band suck in European influences (one minute we could be in a joyous Spanish street carnival, the next we're zoning out down the autobahn as on ‘Pentonia’) they remain ferociously Brit: witty, open hearted and dead funny. And unutterably sociable. There aren't many bands whose tunes you can whistle while a tear rolls down your cheek. Enjoy. We need some good tunes as the mists close in around us.