AC Newman’s third solo album ‘Shut Down The Streets’ was a missed masterpiece of 2012, the Pornographer-in-chief’s melodic deftness stripped bare and intimately licked. Returning to his Canadian base alongside Neko Case and their fellow filth merchants for this long-awaited sixth TNP album, Newman’s brilliant alt-pop tunes about romantic drug deals, heroic lowlifes and being (hic) ‘Champions Of Red Wine’ are hoisted aloft by strident pop stomps and pumped full of sizzling synthetic wonder until they sound like MGMT tackling ELO’s ‘Xanadu’ (‘War On The East Coast’, ‘Backstairs’, ‘Dancehall Domine’). Tinged with Grandaddy and full of hooks that twinkle like the diodes on a robot from 1984, this is an obscenely enjoyable return.