Ben Stein is a dick; and no CD, no matter how good, is going to help us forget for one minute just what a dick Ben Stein is.

Even at its quietest, in improvised segments of scraping strings and squealing horn, there's an electric impatience to this musical collage, a sense of ideas forcing themselves forward, shoving past the obstacle of time.

Guitars chime, choirboy vocals echo and synths stab atop stumbling rhythms. While such naval-gazing nostalgia is nothing new, Violens ditch the anoraks and attack their songs with enough energy to make them complete reinventions rather than rote reinterpretations.

Distill jazz into one iconic image, and you'd almost have to arrive at the saxophone. It's the instrument most associated with the music in its modern guise, and has been since the days when big swing bands yielded to the fiery blowing sessions of bebop.