CULT FIGURES

The 166 Ploughs A Lonely Furrow CULT FIGURES CORPORATION 7/10 Art-time punks: Swell Maps protégés’ long-fermented debut

Sufficiently obscure that they were long assumed to be their art-school pals the Swell Maps in disguise, the Cult Figures released two wildly disparate singles in their first incarnation – the Maps-ish “Zip Nolan” and the wistful “I Remember” – before dissolving in 1980. Real boys after all, their splendidly presented debut LP – named in honour of the bus from Castle Bromwich to Solihull – exhumes the band’s original song cache, with “The Small Room”, “Martin’s Holiday” and psychedelic punkaroo “War On Fun” revealing the Cult Figures as an excitable blend of Wire-ish art-school pop and Rollers shang-a-lang. Really rather gear.