Alabama 3

In a musical climate where bands are generally required to peak by their third album, release a greatest hits and then either grumpily fade from view or else reinvent themselves as fleeting stars of reality TV, Alabama 3 continue to buck the trend and break all the rules.

It is 2010. Brixton's greatest band are well past their third album, and will be forever resistant to the lure of eating bugs in an Australian jungle alongside weather girls and ventriloquists. They are no longer tied to either a major record label or a minor one. Instead, they have set up their own, Hostage, and they record everything at their own Jamm Studios, therefore answering only to themselves. Fortunately, their own exacting standards are far higher than any bar set them by some identikit suit.

They've just made a new album, Revolver Soul, in which they have distilled everything that was always so great about them, while at the same time ramping up the sonic malevolence and their endless ability to surprise. It's an eclectic record full of eclectic styles, which frontman Larry Love inhabits like a ghost with a penchant for mischief. It could well be their defining moment, their crowning achievement to date.

Alabama 3 always were a band who knew people that knew people, and Jamm quickly became the kind of studio for like-minded souls to congregate, a place with no concept of closing time, instead a 24-hour den of iniquity driven by fevered creativity and a willingness to experiment. Consequently, Revolver Soul has become a fantastically collaborative effort of themes and ideas, and great, great tunes. It features Razorlight's Johnny Borrell, Jake Parker, and the inimitable Shane McGowan, alongside Jamm regulars Congo Natty, Tenor Fly and Daddy Freddy.

May we suggest here and now that most of them sound better on Revolver Soul than they ever have before? It's hardly rocket science to know why. Nobody sustains a musical atmosphere like Alabama 3, and anyone who joins the party consequently cannot help but find their true groove.

Revolver Soul is likely to cement a status always destined to be immortalised in stone: the most unlikely band ever to come out of SW9 are also the best band in Britain, the most idiosyncratic, the most continually surprising, the most no-holds-barred fun.

The story of Alabama 3 could never be fiction, if only because fiction could never come up with something quite so spectacularly improbable. You will be familiar with much of it by now, but even its edited highlights make for a cracking read. There are nine of them, sometimes more, occasionally less. They first came together in the mid-1990s as an antidote to British music as it was back then - all Britpop and Union Jacks and champagne at Number 10 - and they made a kind of music soaked not only in American blues but also under the influence of acid, techno and C&W, the result a homemade hooch stewed in honey and soaked in alcohol. 1997's debut album Exile on Coldharbour Lane was a stone cold classic, illicit and feverish like Primal Scream's Screamadelica, but malarial with it. One of its best songs, as any Trivial Pursuit pundit will tell you, made its way across the Atlantic to soundtrack the very best TV series ever to come out of the US. Most bands would end up being defined by something like this forever, possibly even hampered. Not this lot.

Like any act worth its salt, they continued to attract fans from all quarters, frequently quite significant ones. The makers of The Sopranos here, and the people who drew The Simpsons there; the greatest horror writer of them all (Stephen King), and the best modern chronicler of urban youth (Irvine Welsh). They were frequently chemically-assisted and forever politically-motivated, legendary nihilists who could throw a good party and always lend their weight to a good cause. To this end, they've appeared on stage alongside Howard Marks, Gerry Conlan, Tony Benn and Anjelica Houston.

And with each new album came yet more admirers, which served mostly to ratchet up their sense of maverick guile all the more. They went independent, properly so, affiliated to no one but themselves and their own gloriously stubborn manifesto. And through it all, they made some seriously good music.

Which brings us back to Revolver Soul, a statement of intent if ever there was one. It's an album of clashing styles and contradicting tempos, at once mellow and angry and otherworldly. But its atmosphere is the one constant here, a heady musical brew of songs where the temperature is perennially simmering. You sweat simply by listening to it.

Frontman Larry Love has never sounded more exquisitely menacing than he does on the opening Oh Christ, while his duet with Johnny Borrell on She Blessed Me comes drenched in a quasi-religious frenzy redolent of a Harlem Gospel church. Fix it, which features a slurring Shane McGowan, is positively contraband, a shambolically hypnotic, lovely mess, while Bad Girl is pure voodoo, Hostage a thumping reggae colossus, and Vietnamistan an anti-war polemic impossible not to dance to. And then there is Jacqueline, perhaps the most gloriously licentious love song of the modern era, a ballad with balls.

"Everybody knows the devil’s got the best tunes," Love sings at one point, in his habitual low-slung drawl. Not strictly true, this. The devil shares them with Larry Love, and it’s a generosity he would only ever extend to a band like Alabama 3, because only Alabama 3 would know what to do with them.