Cardiff based, Lynne Truss-baitingly unpunctuatedly named The Victorian English Gentlemens Club's first album was, for all its angular excitement, a little too much in thrall to its influences. Most obviously the Pixies in its dynamic malevolence, roughed up surf guitar and male-female vocal interplay, but its sound ran the gamut of post-punk. Not the Gang Of Four post-punk of its 2006 contemporaries, mind, but the variously unorthodox twisted approaches of The Fall and Wire among others. After label and personnel changes this second album has found a way to both refine and integrate thouse touchstones into something more definitively their own.What it certainly isn't, is a record with an eye on Jo Whiley playlists. 'Watching The Burglars' won't sit still for a moment, boasting a rhythm track like Abe Vigoda at three times normal speed and built on terse, semi-cryptic staccato exclamations around an oddly earworming chorus. It may be modern indie's first song to remind at least this listener of Bow Wow Wow and mean it as a complement. And that's their idea of a single.So onto the less commercial stuff, it's apparent that there's something fundamentally creepy and almost mechanical about TVEGC, albeit mechanical in the sense of W. Heath Robinson's cartoons of implausible contraptions, thriving on cyclical construction. Indeeed 'Parrot' clanks like a malfunctioning machine, reminiscent of Wire's underrated mid-80s work, around harbouring Adam Taylor's desperation that the titular bird "hasn't said a word for the past few days" before launching into a distorted bassline and wordless chorus decorated by slashing riffs. 'Bored In Belgium' clatters on at a relentlessly rhythmic pace, marked out by Louise Mason's layered choral vocal of "banging and banging on" - again, that's their idea of a chorus. 'Women Versus Children' pitches feedback and Taylor's on-edge vocal against a falsetto loop of "knives and swimming pools and that" ahead of a crashing power chord aided chorus.While occasionally you can still tell what they've been listening to - 'Worker' and 'I Say What I see' both have the distorted tension build and desperate shouts of Pere Ubu - there's no underlying thread this time that connects the lot to one specific influence other than the unashamedly odd and obtuse. The band are art schoolers and proud of it. Which probably explains their keenness to chop up and rearrange the building blocks of their songs so you can't quite get a handle on them. 'God Save Us From Being So Damn Primitive' boasts an arrythmic, almost sludgy murkiness that briefly seems to seek out common ground between The Bends-era Radiohead (or at least not the 'Fake Plastic Trees'-pace bits) and The Cramps before a solo that starts with that Joey Santiago single string noise and proceeds to break the whole song down into feedback and a flurry of handclaps.The other trick TVEGC like pulling off is lyrics that hold a message but you'd have to concentrate to make complete sense of them. Eventually what emerges is an undercurrent of psychosexual tension, most evident where 'Driver's Companion' tackles sexual inadequacy among long distance HGV drivers and when Mason declares she'll "lie on the floor moving along on the ground, waiting for you like a dog" ('Dog'). 'Periscope Envy', on surface about seaborne boredom, then introduces Sigmund Freud into its snappy group shreik of a chorus and the title develops its other meaning.So, no - Love On An Oil Rig is by no means TVEGC's crossover record. What it is, though, is confirmation that here is a band whose idea of post-punk influences understands what the term was actually aimed at, learning something from the blood and thunder and adapting it towards its own means. Eccentric and not a little plain bizarre, true, but that's the individualism that makes the very best, most scuzzily exciting art-rock bands stand out when they get to difficult second album stage.The Victorian English Gentlemens Club on Myspace