Much as it's well established that anyone who asks and whose demo he judges good enough can record at Electrical Audio Studios, there's still a frisson attached to seeing that phrase 'recording engineer Steve Albini' on a new record. Although he's more eclectic than popularly supposed, when it's applied to a band such as hard gigging Artrocker approved London trio Popular Workshop you know the sonic spectrum you're about to encounter - coruscating guitar, mammoth buzzing bass, battering drums, yelped vocals. All are, by and large, present and correct.With this band, though, once they hit their stride it's clear they have something about them beyond hitching a ride on an automatic cool bandwagon. Despite the springy bass and often indie disco-ready drums this isn't the last gasp of the post-punk revival as such, more towards the wiry, discordant melodies that variously recall Pink Flag Wire, Mission Of Burma and early Idlewild. First proper track 'Alphabet' sounds like Bloc Party's rhythm section circa Silent Alarm borrowing the Cribs' way of moulding a sharply acidic riff into not quite melodic shapes, and while there is more than a trace of that band's trio dynamic at play, at least before their last album scrub-up and NME adoption, Popular Workshop do actually sound like they've immersed themselves in the K Records and Sonic Youth back catalogues the Jarmans talk about all the time.'Her Birthday' resembles Graham Coxon borrowing a riff from the B-52's Planet Claire, while current single 'Reptilians' could have been a modern Jo Whiley-endorsable 'indie' anthem but rightly decides it's far more fun getting stuck into and working around a thoroughly nasty and abrasive central riff. 'Channels' and 'All About Vikki' meanwhile are a late on double whammy of superior examples of the kind of fat-free angularity you don't hear enough bands and producers mine these days, all taut to snapping point dynamics, fractured structure and declamatory choruses, and you can still just about dance to it. Singer Gypsy's vaguely threatening vocals only serve to reinforce the idea that this is a band not to be approached lightly as he arcs to make himself heard over the soaring sounds around him.Ultimately, while We're Alive And We're Not Alone's impact has doubtless been helped along by the spacious thud of an Albini recording, where Popular Workshop get it right is realising the key to still making an impact in the by no means undermanned field of noisy art-disco British guitar bands here in autumn 2008 is finding a happy medium wherein they're still just about accessible for all the fuzzy, scrappy tendencies while dismissing the need to go all T4 clean. Maybe a couple of more samey tracks could have been dropped or pruned, which would admittedly have made the whole album only about half an hour long, and the superior previous single 'Sean' is missing, but this is an exciting, exhiliarating ride through the bumpy world of a band who value controlled semi-chaos well over crossover cool. 76%Popular Workshop on Myspace