Crime And The City Solution are a timely reminder of an era when bands didn’t explode into our musical consciousness perfectly formed with a manifesto, a flawless first album and a festival tour already in the bag.

Formed by singer Simon Bonney in the late 1970’s and partly staffed by ex-Birthday Party bad seeds they spent the best part of a decade churning out introspective, Cave-esque slabs of post-punk blues to little effect before decamping to the brooding, pre-unification Berlin of the mid 1980’s.

It was here that the band, under Bonney’s increasingly assured direction, completed a tantalising triumvirate of albums, ‘Shine’, ‘The Bride Ship’ and ‘Paradise Discotheque’.

Inhabited by Bonney’s desolate baritone with its character-driven confessionals, Bronwyn Adams’ weeping, wracked violin and Alex Hacke’s ghostly blues guitar, the album’s evocations of regret and restrained, ruined majesty were, at their best, both brutal and bewitching. But it was on the group’s last album ‘Paradise Discothèque’ that they finally embraced their own nascent ambition.

Epitomised by the improbable opener ‘I Had A Gun’, possibly the only song in recorded history to flip from breezily acoustic country and western to desperate, metal dirge and back again, the album reels and revels in untrammelled invention.

The sleazily, swinging jazz sax of ‘The Sly Persuade’, the tremulous tabla and mournful mandolin of ‘The Sun Before The Darkness’ and the delicate piano ripples of ‘ The Dolphins and Sharks’ display the joy of a band unshackled.

Lyrically too, Bonney’s depictions grew in emotive resonance. Whether drawing bleakly, obsessive portraits of devotion such as ‘The Dolphins and The Sharks’ or wryly detailing the paranoiac megalomania of a fallen leader as in ‘The Last Dictator Part 1’ Bonney’s clear-sighted, poetic introspections provoke and disturb in equal measure.

Almost inevitably, however, the band’s ambition overreaches itself at points. The laboured bass and irritant toy-town keyboards of ‘The Last Dictator Parts 2 & 3’ sound ill-considered whilst Bonney’s lyrical narrative struggles to find focus, crushed by the weight of its own complexity.

In its final third ‘Paradise Discotheque’ starts to fall apart both musically and lyrically but Crime And The City Solution are still a band that demand your attention. They never made a perfect album, never had a manifesto and never played the festival circuit but there is a well-spring of haunting, heart-rending melancholia within this fascinating document. Accept its flaws. Treasure their music.