Bow Down to the Exit Sign is an album that exists long after the bewitching hour. It picks through dumpsters for food, dwells in damp alleys and sleeps in decaying doorways. If it were hanging out on a corner you'd most likely pull a crumpled dollar bill from your pocket, throw it into its cup then mutter "don't spend it on booze" under your breath as you strode away. In short it's nasty, it's filthy and it is one of the best fucking albums you will hear in your life.

Irish DJ David Holmes has a fondness for the Big Apple. He revels in its people, its attitude and especially in its homeless prophets. Bow Down to the Exit Sign is the perfect follow-up to his deranged masterpiece Let's Get Killed, taking his love of music and his love of urban depravity and merges them, with fantastic results. Loosely based around a screenplay written by Lisa Barros D'Sa, Bow Down... is the soundtrack to the most unholy of nightmares and the most unsanitary of people. To bring these characters to life, Holmes has assembled an all-star cast of collaborators, including Bobby G., Kevin Shields, Martina Toppley-Bird, Jon Spencer and Carl Hancock Rux, each playing out their assigned role in this most disturbingly eclectic of musical tales.

A relentless mish-mash of John Coltrane's wail, The Stooges' raw power and Rev. Al Green's funky stride, Bow Down... is also probably the ugliest musical collage you'll ever hear. Stinking grooves and demented keyboards pervade songs like "Incite a Riot" and "69 Police", while on the flip-side Gillespie, Shields and Co. thrash their way through the amphetamine driven glam-punk stompers "Sick City" and "Slip Your Skin". Former Tricky protégé Martina Toppley-Bird alternately hisses and coos on "Zero Tolerance" while Blues Explosion main man Jon Spencer provides crazed vocals and all around bad vibes to the sweltering "Bad Thing". But the album's most disturbing character comes in the form of Carl Hancock Rux, a relative unknown whose Rux Revue was unjustly ignored by fans and critics alike. His soul-slathered croon drapes "Living Room" and "Compared to What" in sheets of black velvet, cigarette smoke and sweat. Closer "Hey Lisa" provides the album's only moments of respite, its rusty breakbeats and soothing vibraphone augmented by epic cinematic strings (provided by Bond collaborator David Arnold). It wraps up the album nicely, with the beast waking up to find the needle still sticking out of his arm.

Once again Holmes has outdone himself, managing even to out funk and out rock contemporary urban voodoo masterpieces like Death in Vegas' Contino Sessions and Primal Scream's XTRMNTR. I'm not exactly sure what's going on inside Holmes' head, but I can tell you that it is simultaneously brilliant and extremely fucked up.

Bow Down to the Exit Sign: A truly insane album for a sane world.