Swedish black n’roll veterans Turbocharged are back with a sixth full-length look at the seamier side of life and, though they don’t really expand on their previous work overmuch, you get the sense that the drunken hordes who follow their exploits won’t be concerned too much by that news.

So, once again you get a crusty take on Sodom blueprint; The excellent Irreligious throws in a d-beat sensibility that reminds you that Turbocharged take at least as much influence from the world of punk as they do from metal, whereas the more stately opening of the similarly effective Slave Rhetoric comes straight out of the mid eighties Tank playbook. You pay your money, you take your choice…

And that, in reality, is pretty much all you can say when it comes to putting oneself in a position to ‘review’ Turbocharged. They staked out their territory years ago, and nothing about this record shifts the band’s position one iota. Ronnie Ripper growls and roars through every song, simultaneously getting a rather splendid cement mixer noise out of his bass; he rumbles away underneath Old Nick‘s churning rifferama in tandem with Freddie Fister‘s generally frantic percussive battery with practised ease, and together the trio give off the air of a well-drilled unit trying to sound like they really don’t care too much whether you like Phantom Cataclysm or not. Toughnut old pros doing what they do best or cynical old lags on the make by flogging a dead horse one more time? I’ll let you make that decision…

At the end of the day Turbocharged do nothing more or less on Alpha Beast, Omega God than offer the listener what they did on last album Above Lords, Below Earth. At times, as on the scorching Chaos Chronicles or Profane Vortex, it’s still a pretty exciting proposition – clearly there’s a market for it – but sometimes, even at this most primitive of levels, a little bit of progression doesn’t hurt. Probably for fans only.

Alpha Beast, Omega God releases on October 14th.