T he best album I’ve heard so far this year isn’t from this year at all. It’s from 2015 (though its recordings were made decades before that), and is a collection of sludgy, doomy covers of late-70s punk, new wave and pop perennials: My Sharona, Call Me, Walk Like an Egyptian. The guitars on this mysterious tribute album have had their pitch tuned down to a low, thick squelch, the drum beats are slow and punishingly thudding, and the vocals, while sung in a sweet tenor, have a strange, almost lobotomised quality to them. The weirdest thing of all though is who is performing: Alvin, Simon, Theodore. OK, let’s explain. Just over 10 years ago, Canadian musician Brian Borcherdt – best known as one half of experimental noise duo Holy Fuck – bought an old 16rpm turntable, designed for playing slow-speed records such as spoken-word albums. Naturally, Borcherdt immediately started messing about with it, playing normal 45rpm records on the turntable, which slowed them to a disorienting crawl.…