Thompson’s return to electrical form after 2005’s Front Parlour Ballads is an expansive and energized affair that finds the artist so exercised about the current state of America’s involvement in the Middle East that the release can be considered as much a piece of savage agitprop as just another Richard Thompson record. The typical mid-tempo tracks about heartache and more heartache are largely jettisoned here in favor up-tempo material replete with visceral, frequently violent imagery. Thompson seems equally concerned with taking up the torch for frontline soldiers as he is making a more global statement about a pointless war fought for pointless reasons by foolish people. The two standout tracks, “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me” and “Johnny’s Far Away,” explore the terror of going to war (“You hit the booby trap and you’re in pieces/ With every bullet your risk increases”) and the post-traumatic hell that awaits when you get back (“Johnny’s home, he opens up his door/ While someone’s sneaking out the back/ And Tracey says, you look so poorly/ Sores and all, you need to see the quack”). Even the less explicitly anti-war cuts are pretty brutal – the entirely danceable ska track “Francesca,” bitterly culminates with the crushing couplets, “Who laid her down, took her rose/ Who took her flower/ Now she charges by the hour/ Left her the whore of the world.” In Thompson’s world there are no heroes, just the exploiters and the victims.