My co-workers can be an Eyeore-ish bunch. Twice in a week I’ve been politely requested to remove this record from the communal CD player on the grounds that it’s too feelgood, too breathlessly upbeat, too, well, just too Tiggerish for our taste. In fact, it’s bloody exhausting.

Of course, that sort of backhanded brickbat will be music to the ears of Stuart Macbeth and his boozy troupe of casually brilliant traditional jazzmen. The record fizzes with malicious, demonic energy even when they are singing about the joys of camping or the National Trust and it’s probably down to the iron discipline Macbeth expects from his players that there is so little flab on what is quite a long CD. Solos are short and punchy, the music serves the lyrics (unusual in jazz) and nearly all of the songs leave you wanting more. In that sense, The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band has a decidedly pop mentality.

By any standards, it’s a superb party record, but it’s the sort of party where you may be advised to don a Kevlar vest prior to attending. ‘Birdman Of Barley Mow’ sets the tone immediately, Macbeth’s trademark lecherous growl supplemented by an ill-disciplined chorus of drunk hornmen who lend moral support to each gnomic utterance. The music owes something to rock’n’roll pioneers such as Fats Domino as well as the New Orleans jazz that sired him, but the lyrical sensibility behind it is English, and Oxfordshire English at that.

There’s more ingenious wordplay on ‘Matassa’s Ice Cream Parlour’ (how priceless is the couplet, “As proud as Julius Caesar on his new Zanussi Freezer”?) though the picture of a desolate seaside resort in the last verse is nostalgic and even painful – the hero is reduced from owner of his own cafe to just another employee of Mr Whippy. But the music, breezy, pacy and indefatigable, banishes any vestigial self pity.

A record continuing in this vein would probably get tiresome but the Rabbits are versatile enough to vary the diet skilfully. I even quite like the world-weary singing of Skippy Gannon bemoaning the unhappy lot of the journeyman drummer in ‘Highwayman’, another Fats-influenced number punctuated by some deliciously downbeat Mexican trumpeting. Standout track ‘Eynsham Witches’ has a debauched, exhausted flavour to it and some uber-sensitive feminists may even detect a whiff of misogyny in the macabre nonsense lyrics. That said, if Cathy Newman and her monstrous regiment had her way every blues and jazz song ever written by a bloke would probably be erased from history, so we should just ignore them. At any rate, the music has as much power and venom as anything the current generation of rockers can come up with.

Party Seven is another superb record from the Rabbits and I think they capture the Dionysian flavour of their irresistible live shows as effectively as humanly possible. But if you are listening to their ‘Judy Blues’ late at night, please make sure the landing light is on and all the doors are locked.