Album: Richard Thompson

The way in which Richard Thompson divides his time between projects offers an instructive model for how performers of a certain age can keep their muse - and their audience - on its toes by briskly ringing the changes.

In recent years, he's focused on solo performance, with the ambitious 1000 Years Of Popular Music followed by the home-made solo acoustic album Front Parlour Ballads and his instrumental soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. About time, then, for another electric album - and one of his best, too. Sweet Warrior's tales of romantic dispute, disillusion and war combine to give a masterclass in conflict. The cast includes characters such as the hypocritical "Sneaky Boy", the rich oaf "Mr Stupid", and the immature "Bad Monkey", who "goes from joy to suicide about 15 times a day", as well as the more sensitively-sketched lovelorn victims of pieces such as "Sunset Song", "Poppy Red" and "Francesca" ("Who shook the stars from her eyes... who put a cloak round her soul?").

Perhaps the best of the latter is "Take the Road You Choose", a reflective number that finds the singer haunted by lost love, "looking for ghosts behind me", but clearly not too distressed to deliver a sublime guitar break. It's one of several superb solos that pepper these songs, including two dazzling runs in "Guns Are the Tongues", in which fiddle, mandolin and hurdy-gurdy underscore a story in which a terrorist matriarch seduces another callow youth into martyrdom: "Guns are the tongues, little Joe/The only words we know/The only sound that'll reach their ears".

Elsewhere, Thompson draws on a range of modes, from the reggae-beat of "Francesca" to the string-laced ballad "She Sang Angels To Rest", and the R&B-charged rockabilly of "Bad Monkey" to the sea shanty "Johnny's Far Away", a cleverly even-handed song detailing the separate affairs pursued by an absent seaman and his lonely wife. Perhaps the most compelling song here, however, is "Dad's Gonna Kill Me", the tale of a hapless GI stuck in Iraq, his situation summed up in a chorus of repeated phrases - "Nobody loves me here"/"Dad's gonna kill me" - which appear to show him trapped between expectations at home and antipathy abroad; except that the "dad" in question is apparently US infantry slang for "Baghdad", thereby furnishing an ironic commentary on the real influences forcing grunts to grow up fast. Complex and controversial, it's typical of an album that's intelligent, entertaining and impeccably realised, and Thompson's best this century.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Dad's Gonna Kill Me', 'Take the Road You Choose', 'Bad Monkey', 'Guns Are the Tongues'