Richard Thompson, founding member of Fairport Convention, is one of the last great truly literate songwriters around, and one of the few guitarists whose lead playing can stand the test of time, decade after decade. He can be caustic, bitter and scathing towards his fellow man; sometimes he's forgiving toward humanity, even hopeful. The albums he recorded with his wife Linda during the '70s could be morbidly depressing, but rarely were they boring or uninteresting. Thompson has a near-limitless range on the guitar, which he uses to perfectly mirror whatever sentiment he happens to be conveying in a given song. And his slightly hoarse death-rattle of a voice now has some low end to it and has become a sort of pleasantly gruff Warren Zevon-ish bark.

As per usual on his studio efforts, Thompson, for the most part, keeps his formidable fretboard skills at bay, playing with an admirable yet sometimes frustrating sense of restraint. He's one of the few guitarists around who can, however, embark on extended runs without seeming redundant or self-indulgent as he effortlessly improvises around the core notes. But he usually saves that sort of stretching out for his too few and far between stage performances.

Mock Tudor kicks off in fine fashion with the goodtime rockabilly and chugging freight-train rhythms of "Cooksferry Queen," a song about an Everyman character named Mulvaney who finds a way to transcend his mundane lot in life-- drop acid and pop pills with a wandering hippie/gypsy chick moon child he meets on the street.

On "Hard On Me," we get Thompson at his savage best as a lead guitarist. In an era when guitar solos are often seen as beside- the- point statements of a bygone age, Thompson can bring dignity and relevance back to the act of soloing with just a few stinging notes. He combines the emotional intensity of Neil Young with the agility and polished musicianship of an old rockabilly player like the great Cliff Gallup. And here, he lets loose on guitar as if to rip the strings from the neck. The two blistering solo breaks on this track pick up right where he left off 20-odd years ago on "Shoot Out the Lights." Thompson's inherently Celtic-folk guitar phrasing, played with this near-violent passion, comes out slightly skewered and sufficiently menacing, yet always with a dazzling degree of technical accomplishment.

Thompson's playing on the rest of Mock Tudor, however, is a portrait of strict economy. The best example of his more casual, melodic side is probably the ringing Nashvillean fills all over the immaculate country-folk of "Walking the Long Miles Home," which kind of recalls the Fairport Convention-al Thompson of old.

Mock Tudor's implied thematic core-- the plasticity and paper-thin commercialism Thompson observes infecting England-- is embodied most notably by "Sights and Sounds of London Town," a sort of Londoner's "Desolation Row." It's a wry jab at fading old-country values and the no-good weasels responsible. Here, we meet a few of Thompson's fictional composites embodying the new smarmy Americanism afoot in jolly old London. There's a shady businessman getting a "Blackmail here/ Sting on the side/ Enough to get going on the next enterprise." And Gillian, the "Doncaster lass" who's forced to sell her body to support the kids: "Friday night leaves the kids at home/ Struts her stuff on the Euston road, saying/ Do want some company, darling?"

"Dry My Tears and Move On," deals with traditional heartachy breakup themes and comes close to hitting its mark (although it does sail a bit close to the winds of pedestrian Clapton-ish sentimentality). "Crawl Back (Under My Stone)," and "Hope You Like the New Me" both flirt with the kind of acidic, black satire that Thompson's always had such a facility for. But even here he seems to pull his punches and hold back somewhat, never really making his point with the sort of biting ferocity we know he's capable of.

And although Mock Tudor doesn't exactly look at the world through rose-colored glasses, that traditional Thompsonian more- minor- than- major chord melancholy is somewhat lacking here, as are the lyrical ruminations on love and death, truly discomforting psychological truths, and, in general, unflinching views of humanity in its most debased and tragic states. I'm not saying that Thompson's edges have been completely smoothed over, but the album does fall somewhat short of its conceptual ambitions.

-Michael Sandlin