Anecdata’s If I Was PM… turns the guitars up to 11 then somehow, further defying the laws of marks out of 10, throws piercing synths on top of that.

It’s 32 minutes and 29.7 seconds of new wave indie grunge (a little bit more if you download the whole album from Bandcamp – yes, there are bonus goodies).

Things kick off with the furious ‘Misery in Charge’, which begins with the album’s title and layers Numan-style keyboards on top of Nirvana-style chords.

The current sorry state of the country, if not world, is a recurring theme – ‘I’m a Landlord’ cuts to the core of how being a wealthy and successful parasite must feel, switching between off-kilter indie pop and swirling psychedelia, and ‘Trickle-Up’ uncovers truth in reversing the long-discredited economic theories of the 1980s that still seem to dominate our politics.

‘Big Oil’ and ‘The Bike Song’ tackle the cluster**** that is Auckland’s traffic system (sounds a lot better on speakers than on paper!) while ‘Need a Million Dollars’ uses surreal imagery and Weezer/Cheap Trick power-chords to state the obvious, really.