Whether it’s their consistently inconsistent live shows, their self-conscious art-rock posing or simply bassist Ollie Clueit’s ‘hilarious’ drunken heckling at local gigs, Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia seem to get people’s backs up like no other Oxford band. But then all the best bands provoke extreme reactions, and the Russians’ second album, the follow-up to 2001’s ‘Indian Ink’, proves that whatever their live failings, on album they are still one of the best bands Oxford has produced.

18 months, plus the departure of founding member Mark O’ Halloran before this album was fully finished, haven’t improved MBICR’s mood much and if anything ‘My Elixir; My Poison’ is an even more downbeat trip into poetic psychosis than its predecessor. The band have reigned in much of the spiralling feedback and screaming that marked their debut, and tunnelled their way into an icy cave of morbid gothic introspection and a general loathing of self and the world around. Piano, keyboards and horns have edged out effects-laden guitars on tracks like ‘Roses For Her’, while the haunting ‘Holomovement’ owes plenty to the neo-classical splendour of This Mortal Coil. There’s no redemption in sight: the light at the end of their tunnel is the light of the oncoming train.

Of course this will all be a little bit too much for fools who believe brainless ska-punk to be some kind of apex of human evolution, but the whole point of MBICR is that they are pretentious art-fag posers. It’s what makes everything they do seem like something from a different plain of thought. By midway through ‘My Elixir’ they’ve lost sight of the horizon and are exploring inner space. The only way you could dance to a track like ‘New Adventures’ is alone in the dark with a needle hanging out of your arm.

Let’s not get too carried away by musical pixies though. There are some obvious reference points here: Edith Plath’s angst-laden poetry, Sonic Youth’s dismantling of traditional rock structures, Swans’ gothic folk doodlings and Michael Nyman’s eerie film scores. But there isn’t anyone else who sounds even remotely like MBICR around, and certainly no-one, bar Nick Cave maybe, who sounds as remote.

‘My Elixir; My Poison’ is a cult album in the making. One for the spooky kids, the self-consciously odd, poetry-reading inner goths and people who get a kick out of sitting alone in the dark - with or without a needle protruding from a vein. It’s dark and difficult and perfectly realised. It’s a monument to both the band’s resilience in the face of their own chaotic existence and to the creative energy that exists between them. Brilliant.

Dale Kattack