Thompson’s last album of the 1990s is still another strong outing in the career of this most consistent of recording artists. An engaging series of dark character sketches and creepy-nostalgic reminisces of the England of his boyhood, Mock Tudor is an impressive instance of world building through song craft, vivid in detail and bracing in execution. Emphatic opener “Cooksferry Queen” is a lurid love letter from a criminal to his chosen moll, while the rockabilly-flavored “Two Faced Love” is the sort of morbidly funny meditation on love and mendacity which Leonard Cohen has made a cottage industry of in his later years. Meanwhile the gorgeous soul ballad “Dry My Tears And Move On” is the kind of vintage lament that makes one wish Otis Redding were still here to provide a reading, or that maybe Rod Stewart or Van Morrison will get there yet. Meanwhile, the eerie minor-key closer, “Hope You Like The New Me,” ends things on an anxious, menacing note, with the singer threatening a perceived rival with a callousness bordering on chilling. Tough and unsparing, Mock Tudor finds Thompson very much in control of his gifts three decades into his career, with no perceivable threat of going soft.