Album: Ping Pong Bitches

With a name suggestive of Bangkok bar girls blessed with unusual table-tennis skills, and outfitted in the Eighties rock-chick uniform of spike heels, shades and skintight strides, the Ping Pong Bitches clearly have faith in clichés that have long since faded from fashion almost everywhere. Five years on from their Poptones debut, Alphadog shows them to be replete with cartoon menace and E-number eroticism, rattling off hoary old nonsense like "Feel the beast in me" and "I'll take you to the devil", and singing about "Kinky Boots" obviously cobbled not from leather but from the Naugahyde roof-skin of a '69 Capri. They're so quaintly dedicated to the pursuit of bogus teen outrage that they even have a track called "Rock Action", on which their retro-futurist electropop is thoroughly bludgeoned by a monster rock-guitar riff from ex-Pistol Steve Jones. As it happens, it's one of two decent pieces, the other being the single "Roc Ya Body", a Daft Punk-simple stomper on which everything fizzes with the mutant energy that should have been plastered over the entire album. A missed opportunity.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Roc Ya Body', 'Rock Action'