For The Want Of Some Better TV

When an album kicks off with the line "She broke my heart, so I ate her liver/And dumped her putrefying carcass in the river", you know you're not in for an easy ride. But hey, hey, it's The Hitchers - Limerick's very own post-modern, guitar-pop ironists - with another instalment of cartoon punk for our delectation and delight.

But is it any good, I hear you say? Well that depends on where you stand on buzz-saw guitars, impossibly daft rhyming couplets and off-kilter melodies. Personally, I think there hasn't been enough of it about - not since the demise of Half Man Half Biscuit anyway.

If there is a theme running through these ten numbers penned by Niall Quinn, it's on the frailties of the human body and its vulnerability in the face of violence from all quarters. This predeliction is demonstrated aptly on 'Human Skull: "Human Skull if you could talk you'd tell a story . . . I guess the end was pretty gory".

The title track, in all its punk-attired glory, appears to blame the box for all kinds of social ills: "Kill them all and burn their bodies", there's a brief tirade against the music business - "an industry of idiots" on 'It's A Context Thing' (welcome to the club lads!); and a pretty decent Ramones pastiche can be heard on 'Even At Your Bravest'.

The novelty wears a bit thin towards the end and it's probably about 20 years too late to have any kind of mainstream impact. As Quinn pointedly observes in 'Popstars': "We're hot if you say so,

but popstars by Christmas - I don't

think so."