Melt Yourself Down’s Last Evenings On Earth (2016) seemed to share the apocalyptic, transmuting themes of Shabaka Hutchings’ parallel work with The Comet Is Coming. Since Hutchings left to focus on just three bands, Melt Yourself Down leader Pete Wareham’s own intentions have been clearer. As with Acoustic Ladyland, he’s bored by genre borders. This third album is only residually jazz (however you want to define that) with Wareham’s woodpecker sax stabs the music’s main receptacle. Instead, it updates the politicised 1980s punk-funk of The Pop Group and Pigbag, jerking dance music nervously out of shape, as Kush’s vocals veer between clamorous and mournful. A post-colonial Basement Jaxx or post-Brexit 2-Tone also enter the mix, as Melt Yourself Down join London’s new jazz scene in grappling with Grenfell’s national indictment and, on ‘Boot and Spleen’, the complexity of Britishness. ‘This Is the Squeeze’ is an Indo-psychedelic banger, ‘Crocodile’ all Kid Creole Latin lilt, even as a face-melting drug leaves its protagonist ‘at the window screaming’. Potential transformation remains the goal. “Sometimes you need to kill your life to come alive,” Kush declares on the swaggering, insistent ‘It Is What It Is’, unintentionally pertinent as hibernation and, for the lucky, rebirth becomes a global condition. ‘100% Yes’ rides in on dancing bass and slivered cymbal-hisses as a final vision of positivity hovers over the groove, the dark experiences which Kush’s life provides never allowed to overwhelm. As with those 1980s forebears, the abrasive assault will divide, but resonate too.