First time I saw Richard Thompson was at a festival a few summers back. My not-yet two-year-old daughter sat on my shoulders for what seemed like a thousand sun-burning, bone-crushing hours, as we watched band after band. She bounced and gurgled and half-strangled her old man, loving the rhythm and joy of the Afro-Celts, Orchestra Baobab and ... um ... Bad Manners. And then RT - a man whose work, apart from the songs with Linda (in particular, the divine Dimming Of The Day) I didn’t really know - came on. Two and a half harshly fiddley, guitar-driven, rock-wrapped, grumpily-ranting, folkily-jerky, jazzily-meandering songs in, my daughter stopped moving and started, gently at first, crying. I lowered her to the ground, she took one, final, angry/frightened look at the scary man on stage and ran for it, heading screaming towards the exits, followed by her (slightly relieved) father.

Wind on a few years and the eternal flirter-with/fucker-of the mainstreams comes into our lives again. He’s done another four hundred and forty-seven astonishingly-varied projects in the meantime, including the impressively idiosyncratic 1000 Years Of Popular Music and 2005’s quite-interesting acoustic Front Parlour Ballads, and has remained tangential to - frequently at odds with - both folk and rock. He’s done more stuff with the resurrected Fairports, he’s deepened his spiritual practice, he’s honed his incredibly sharp improvisational guitar technique, he’s continued to be a fascinating, challenging man. And - Jesus - he’s got even more pissed-off:

Sweet Warrior starts relatively innocuously- the Celtic-bluegrass (Horslips, anyone?) Needle And Thread is - like much here - hooky and melodic, poppy even, in its construction, its snide, dissolute words the work of a London geezer dropped down into some mid-West hick town. Next one, I'll Never Give It Up - "I don’t need your reptile smile" - is cold blues, its folky chorus derisive and come-and-'ave-a-go. Warmth and heart make a brief appearance - along with a return to the country-inflections of his 70’s stuff - with the exquisitely, painfully open Take Care The Road You Choose, but the freeze and fog quickly descend again. Mr Stupid (which will no doubt be a great gig singalong) finds Thompson sharp-edged, lyrically witty, bitter, somewhere between Kinks kanniness and early-Costello misanthropy, musically firmly astride a jaunty but bland rock/pop amalgam. Empathy - kind of - blunts the gloomy blades in the strong and enraged anti-War Dad's Gonna Kill Me but Thompson's is a harsh, pleading compassion, disillusioned and pessimistic. Poppy-Red, similarly, is crimson-dark and insinuated with the why-me of unnecessary loss and pain. Five songs in and it’s all been a bit knackering - clever, neat and a little soulless.

And it’s becoming apparent that if there’s a thematic thread linking the (mostly) rhythmically upbeat songs, it’s anger, it’s ire, it’s the eternally destructive battles we all fight - as individuals, as groups, as nations - to survive. It’s the damage we do to each other, the absurdities of our desires, the self-destructiveness that we hate in others while indulging our own ... Melodically, stylistically, though, Thompson and his supremely competent band are undercutting The Message with a musical context that - while it drags folk on board - seems more akin to the lager-lightness of pub-rock stuff of the early Seventies - both the musos-with-attitude, influences-on-sleeves and cheap suits of pre-punk London, and the ‘finely-crafted’ literate-Brit R’n’R/country-inflected Stiff stuff (though not the angrier ramalama riffy Feelgoody stuff - or soulful Graham Parker stuff) that emerged from it - Nick Lowe, Dave Edmonds, Costello, Squeeze, Dire Bleeding Straits.

So we take a collective deep breath and the second swathe of songs on this long, long album begins with the Lowey, horn-led popabilly of Bad Monkey (at which point - with not a little disappointment - you realize Thompson’s guitar here sounds like bloody Knopfler’s). The reggae-lite but powerfully, intriguingly chorused Francesca is interesting (nothing more); Too Late To Come Fishing is more vituperative mid-paced balladry and super-sarcy Sneaky Boy sounds - unexpectedly - like a straightened-out early XTC: Thompson’s voice (never exactly in the Partridge league) is becoming wearing, grating. It’s like the festival all over again ... as a precaution, I keep my now MCR-loving daughter out the room.

But there’s one final surprise: Thompson soars delicately away from rock/pop territory for the last, more folk-drenched section of the album. The charmingly string-encased, piano-lightened olde worlde lost-love-longing of She Sang Angels To Rest is scarlet, seaside, Sunday, searing; Johnny's Far Away’s story of unfaithfulness parodies and subverts folk clichés - musical, vocal and lyrical - in a complex weave of glorious fiddles, guitar, drums, voice and words that flows and ebbs and bobs and weaves in a neat, pleasurable conjunction of old and new. Guns Are The Tongues’ martial drums and Middle Eastern feel, flip-side of the anti-Western Dad’s Gonna Kill Me, feel darker and more pleasurably suffocating than that song’s somewhat obvious sentiments: violently anti-violence, it screams at the lure and manipulation of terrorism and fundamentalism. The culminating Sunset Song’s sweet guitared old English folk-song, Northern Europe transported to the Mediterranean, feels dark and rich.

And ... it’s over.  A single-minded, focused, intelligent ride, Sweet Warrior is one that’s leaves a spiky sense of dissatisfaction. Like his lyrical second-cousins, Costello and Davies and Difford, Thompson proves he can be sharp and clever and provocative; as with them, though, there’s often an observer’s over-wryness, a tiringly chilled lack of passion (or, rather, a lurking passion that’s masked and dissolved and over-thought). The uncompromising, chilly nature of his voice - English, vernacular, twisting and bitter -  add to the apparent disengagement. And - somewhat paradoxically - only the more ‘traditional’, rootsy harmonic and melodic elements intrigue, suggest a willingness to experiment, to stretch out.

Definitely worth a listen then, but, ultimately, if you want movement, rhythm, challenge, soul, try his '70s stuff. And if you want to entertain young children, I’d go for Bad Manners.

Release date: 28/05/07
Artist website: www.richardthompson-music.com
Label: Proper