Collaborating with your former producer and band member is perhaps understandable, but writing music for an avant-garde dance-expression performance-type farrago might well be considered foolhardy.

The first worrying factor is what the hell their dances will actually consist of. Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Murder of Innocents? Bit of religion? Bit of war? Bit of doomed romance? And persumably everyone would have to die tragically at the end. Well, we can always avert our eyes and immerse ourselves in the music. Great comfort that’s likely to be.

If Polly Jean has ever been aware of being caricatured as the female Nick Cave, she certainly makes no effort to prove us wrong. More emotional tightropes and less bottomless pits of purgatory, perhaps, but otherwise it’s a familiar story: Rope Bridge Crossing is macabre, bottle-scarring guitar blues about losing one’s mother; Taut is a hairtearing guitar maelstrom, with clattering rhythms and a story about adolescent lust, tragic romance, murder and religion. Even the cover of Lieber and Stoller’s Is That All There Is? has childhood innocence, depression, lost love, and, you guessed it, death at the end. But stylisted as Louse Point all is, it’s impeccably stylish with it, our Polly oozing rich and strange emotional colours across Parish’s edgy, scary soundscapes.

Memorable peaks are many: when City Of No Sun starts to scream blues murder over shrink’s couch confessions and compulsive strumming, Taut’s bewildering, innocent chaos; and Heela’s malevolent bass prowling across a momentious R&B rhythm.

Somehow, one doubts this contemporary dance project is going to be West End material, but it should find a comfortable place in the seventh circle - or indeed, the stalls - of Hell. And we, of course, will be burning along with it.
7/10