It is reassuring that one of rock's most important singer-songwriters can release one of his best records at a time when good records are increasingly endangered. Not that there is a lack of talented artists or that Richard Thompson is on top of the prevailing zeitgeist (whatever that is), but too much music is hopelessly intertwined with the gushing superfluity of media hype to accurately consider on its own terms. Thompson has sustained a 30-year career in pop without the media fanfare accorded to, say, the Stones. He's more consistent than Neil Young, less contemptuous than Lou Reed, and warmer than Bob Dylan—all of whom have released good records in the '90s. Thompson's Mock Tudor is stronger than any of them.

A putative concept album about the city of the heart, Mock Tudor is actually a stunning collection of songs detailing Thompson's richly ironic and dark-hued perspective on love. In his universe joy is always tinged with bitterness, sadness with humor, and the maddening experience of life is measured by the ability to love when you are not loved.

Thompson has always been a literate songwriter, enlisting a sense of place and time to evoke emotional response. The title character of "Cooksferry Queen," for example, has "Pre-Raphaelite curls in her hair," and Gillian, from the first verse of the lovingly detailed "Sights And Sounds Of London Town," "Leaves the kids at home/Struts her stuff on the Euston Road." He also condenses complicated states of mind into terse, loaded, almost fragmented verses such as "I bite my rage/I stop my breath/I shake my cage/I swim with emptiness" from "Hard On Me," or "I'll be sober by break of day/In the dark I rehearse all the right things to say" from "Walking The Long Miles Home," or "If there's no me then there's no sin" from "Uninhabited Man," one of the most existential songs in all of pop.

"Bathsheba Smiles" is as great, as unknowable a song as any from his prodigious output. The chorus is sublime, skewering faith with the smile of one who smiles because she knows it ensnares. "Hope You Like The New Me" is frighteningly abject: "I stole your wife—hope you don't mind/She was looking bored don't you think." This particular narrator has traversed the emotional spectrum only to arrive at the shell of amorality. Harsh in the extreme, but Thompson has always explored the lowest tendencies of men, including himself.

These wonderful songs are clothed in some of the most impressive melodies of his career. They are deceptively catchy and the production doesn't trick them up. The drums crack, and Thompson rips, swaggers, and soothes with his liquid guitar. His solos on "Hard On Me," the sort of flailing mid-tempo rocker he always excels at, allude to the title track of Shoot Out The Lights, as if he recognizes the emotional kinship Mock Tudor has with the earlier storied record. There is brilliance here in every supremely crafted song, and Thompson's burnished vocals hit emotional highs and lows rarely heard in pop. The allure of Mock Tudor is succinctly pinpointed in his line from "Uninhabited Man": "A romantic ruin am I/Funny how I catch your eye."

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