Never let anyone tell you that there is any justice in the world of music. The cream rarely rises to the top, the wheat is seldom sorted from the chaff, the apple often falls miles away from the tree. Wait, scratch that last one – lost focus for a second there, sorry.

At any rate, you get the picture; the industry is practically awash with a veritable flood of wildly successful artists who are mind-numbingly mediocre. Artists whose overhyped existence merely serves to obscure the quietly competent output created by those who, inexplicably, have been overlooked by the vast majority of the record-buying public.

Anyone who loves music, who spends even five minutes searching it out rather than merely guzzling down whatever is served up for them by the media and PR machine, will be familiar with at least one example of this. Just as everyone has their guilty pleasures, so everyone has at least one record in their collection which would be greeted with a round chorus of ‘who?’ were its merits ever to be extolled in conversation. (Granted, there are also real music obsessives who would not be surprised by anything you might have on your playlist, but those people probably don’t read reviews so sod ‘em)

Enter Motion City Soundtrack. It beggars belief that bands such as Panic! At the Disco, the All-American Rejects and the Plain White T’s have enjoyed such mainstream success in these islands’ charts while MCS have been repeatedly ignored. The pop-punk genre is one that is incredibly overpopulated with substandard, samey-samey bands fronted by whinging bastards whose shockingly awful hairstyles and crap vocals makes you want to kick them in the balls over and over and over... so to rise above the dross, it takes a genuinely impressive effort.

My Dinosaur Life is not the first MCS album to achieve this. In fact, every one of the band’s three previous albums has been of a high quality, boasting some absolutely cracking tracks. Arguably, 2005’s Commit This To Memory has been their best record yet, but this latest album isn’t far off that standard. It helps that frontman Justin Pierre is as wry and eloquent with his lyrics as ever, that Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus is on production duties (he produced Memory too so he knows what works) and that there is a glut of catchy hooks to work with.

From the bouncy rhythms of A Lifeless Ordinary (Need a Little Help), through the insanely up-tempo numbers like Delerium and Hysteria, to the sweet handclappy earnestness of Stand Too Close, there is simply no doubt that this is Motion City Soundtrack on top form. @!#?@! sounds like Weezer, only better. History Lesson has an anthemic chorus you could easily imagine being belted out at concerts. The lyrics are intelligent, articulate and detailed across the board, and this example from Pulp Fiction is highly representative; “Like a slasher film / I’m torn in opposite directions / the plot sucks, but the killings are gorgeous.”

This bunch might not be household names, but they sure deserve to be.

- Sebastian Clare