- Monster Magnet have long had a penchant for the weirder, unknown tunes of the '60s and '70s, and on A Better Dystopia they have dug deep into their record collections for obscurities and brought them to life for a 21st Century audience.

As such, there’s a good chance many listeners won’t be familiar with some of the song choices, which in many ways makes A Better Dystopia sound like an original Monster Magnet album, which should please their fanbase just fine.

Being forced to stay home and watch the world fall apart over the last eighteen months or so, Dave Wyndorf has cherrypicked some of the most apocalyptic tunes from the past, that somehow seem entirely appropriate for the current state of things.

The album kicks off with The Diamond Mine, a trippy monologue by DJ Dave Diamond, a proponent of classic psychedelic rock, which morphs into Hawkwind’s Born to Go, powered by a ploughing riff, blistering solos and Wyndorf at his bellowing best.

The wonderfully named Epitaph for a Head is up next, and the JD Blackfoot number is peppered with shrieking slide guitar, while The Scientists’ Solid Gold Hell gets an ominous heavy makeover, with tribal drums and a hallucinogenic riff hanging in the air like an opiate haze.

The group give a nod to metal progenitors Pentagram on the appropriately titled Be Forewarned, which is one of the album’s most potent and melodramatic moments, featuring a main riff that recalls the classic 1967 Batman theme with more sinister overtones.

Poo-bah’s Mr. Destroyer is the first single from the album, with pummeling guitar and echoplex vocals and accented bursts of wah-wah, while the stop-start dynamics of Jerusalem’s When the Wolf Sits (another great title) proves a fine showcase for Wyndorf’s vocals.

Death (The Pretty Things), a dirgey ballad tempered by a rubber band riff, funereal organ and sitar accents, with a doomed romantic vibe that the group pull off with aplomb, conjuring cinematic imagery and a gloriously gloomy mood.

The Cavemen’s It’s Trash gets a manic garage rock on steroids makeover, while the Table Scrap’s Motorcycle (Straight to Hell) rides a groove that makes for the album’s most insistent earworm.

The album closes with Learning To Die (Dust) and the bonus track Welcome To The Void (Morgen), with the former’s loud-quiet dynamics and frequent tempo shifts providing counterpoint to the latter, an epic space rock journey, which is exactly where Monster Magnet like to take their audience. Out now on Napalm Records, this album is a must-have for any fan of dirty scary rock and or roll.

- Judy Jetson.