Gang Of Four‘s last album Shrinkwrapped came out in 1995. Pretty much at heart it came with the same displaced cauterisation of the personal as political with serrated guitar and disco-post-punk rhythms that served them so well a decade and a half earlier. The Britpop kids weren’t interested in having their party spoilt and so over here few noticed. They did in America, though. When their glorious and still thrillingly uncompromised line in the sand debut Entertainment! was given its first US reissue that same year, liner notes of glowing praise and reflected influence were penned by Michael Stipe, Flea and Tad Doyle of Seattle grunge also-rans Tad, there to speak on behalf of Kurt Cobain. When a wave of new British bands and the music press picked up on them around the post-punk revival of 2003-04 it felt like a group of people straining to catch up. It also felt like they were doing it in the simplest way, referencing the use of staccato guitar and hi-hat without taking on the jagged funk undertow or left-wing situationist lyrics. Those might not have played so well in the mass market.

As with Shrinkwrapped, and despite original members Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham taking part in their 2004 reformation and remaining for a few years, the Gang Of Four behind Content is Jon King and Andy Gill plus hired hands. At least that pair are on the same warpath as they ever were, King’s accusatorial bark feuding with Gill’s darting, weaving, messed up guitar sound and occasional nasal baritone counterpoint, rhythm section on lockdown behind them.

Something’s not quite there, though. It’s not the players’ advancing years, because they still sound hungry and fat-free and not at all like they’re in it to claim late period riches. It’s that at their fastest, for all its precision angular engineering there’s few occasions where the band allow themselves to let fly in the way they used to. ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad’ and the privilege mocking ‘You’ll Never Pay For The Farm’ have the ingredients – King spitting out the pointed lyrics, Gill chanting a chorus of sorts, feedback-laced jolts, unstable bass – but feel strangely tentative, like they’re continually waiting for the signal to really explode into targeted anger.

It’s primarily a shame because there’s plenty on Content to suggest they still have the energy and questing knowhow to take quasi-Marxist distorted scree to the dancefloor. ‘I Can’t Forget Your Lonely Face’ is as direct as the album gets, laying some sort of snake charmer’s instrument effect hook under Gill’s start-stop slashing as King almost sounds regretful. Is it a straight love missed song? Probably not. ‘I Party All The Time’, title juxtaposed with “I’m not innocent, I’m a party to the crime”, recalls their experiments in funk from 1982′s Solid Gold with some success. Not that all the production experiments work. The scratchy attack of ‘She Said You Made A Thing Of Me’, like a malfunctioning fax machine through a delay pedal, jars against its electronic undertow and it’s not until a full-on scuzzy solo that it briefly achieves takeoff. Furthermore Gill’s varied production credits might suggest to him that vocodered lead vocals and minimal backing might work as a curveball for most bands but ‘It Was Never Gonna Turn Out Too Good’, for its evocation of the end of everything, comes at the wrong moment. Contradictory as it may sound, it also jars in the midst of the album’s fairly consistently scuffed up flow.

Content isn’t a bad album by any means – it’s an energised 35 minutes of a band as itchy and forceful as they were first time around, still a rarity with reformations. It just feels like they’re missing a couple of cylinders, not wanting for effort but cagey and sapped of some vitality where they should be setting down a full throttle marker for those that followed in their footsteps. To mix metaphors, a curate’s egg where they should have pulled out a timebomb.