In Big Sexy Noise, her new collaboration with the alternately brooding and explosive British swamp rockers Gallon Drunk, Lydia Lunch seems to be glaring over her shoulder at the past. In the 1970s as the No Wave movement's teenaged death kitten in a baby doll nightie, Lunch cut a path of deliberate destruction. In 2009 as a mature artist, punk's ornately tattooed high priestess seems ready to reflect - even if it means looking back in anger.

The CD opens with a viciously low-slung reinterpretation of the song "Gospel Singer", which Lunch originally recorded with her short-lived punk band Harry Crews in 1988. On "God Is a Bullet" she revisits the Charles Manson fixation she first explored with Sonic Youth in 1985 on "Death Valley '69". Lunch has frequently cited Lou Reed's legendarily bleak 1973 album Berlin as a transformative early influence; here she pays tribute by covering Reed's "Kill Your Sons".

Elsewhere in Big Sexy Noise, Lunch frequently sounds like she's channeling the music that soundtracked her pre-Teenage Jesus and The Jerks sulky juvenile delinquent adolescence in Rochester, New York: the aforementioned Lou Reed, The Doors, The Stooges. In fact the sound of The Stooges circa Funhouse – when their music was driven along by blurting, honking sax – underpins this album (Big Sexy Noise reunites Lunch with her frequent musical partner-in-crime, multi instrumentalist Terry Edwards. The combination of her embittered sneer and the dissonant skronk of Edward's sax is a marriage made in death jazz heaven).

But rest assured, Lunch is far too perverse and defiant to be nostalgic: Big Sexy Noise opts to blast the listener's face off rather than comfort. While Lunch adopts the persona of a vengeful biker mama and vents her myriad frustrations in an increasingly deeper, darker and harsher rasp, the band expertly crank up an abrasive blues punk / heavy metal hybrid - the kind of music you imagine booming out of a sleazy biker bar (only truly smart people can make a racket this brutally, primitively moronic). Meanwhile, "Dark Eyes" is driven, pissed-off and gloomy. On "Diggin the Hole" Lunch's ragged howl, drenched in echo, evokes Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux, and the nasty, finger-snapping jazz of "Bad for Bobby" recalls the film noir vibe of Lunch's 2004 album Smoke in the Shadows .  

Big Sexy Noise is the sound of Lunch having a scary, malevolent good time. Who could resist a hard, dirty pounding from Lydia Lunch?
Graham Russell