"Sing at least one of the truths every day." The 'speaksong' cycle goes beyond rhetoric and winds itself up for moral instruction. Militantly, it junks old modernist saws of lyrical performance and performativity - the Brecht/Weill binary tension of words and music doing their own contradictory, dialectical things, Mallarme's directives against description as representation. Instead Burn and Mitchell pile up words 'about' their subjects like bonfires in post-apocalyptic high streets. The music is illustrative, it "furthers the meaning", pushing the marchers on, but the march isn't there.

In the early parts of the cycle the lyric itself is hero and heroic, "unbeaten in heartsweet bone blue", text is a state of mind, and geographical and political too, an entity with an army - or at least a state troop. The music waits and waits, toeing the frontline, almost drummed in, promising but not released, teasing, until the interruptions are so repeated they become their own climax... so it begins, then straightway it ends. The flower is reversed.

Burn delivers like an evangelist, breathy, growling, stage-whispering, dramatic-sincere like a James Earl Jones voiceover for the tv war on terror, and then the voice changes and the lyricist himself is hero/priest, invoking the conflict, casting out the Freedom Fries, and the broken down rock begins to grind itself back to life.

The studio feels more and more like a drowned church, fragments of Sappho are called up for a dedication, flawed blues-saints are listed, prophesying in the second piece, the guitar slides on a slithery antediluvian Southern porch. In the gothic architecture of the phrase-making everyone's going to get "jailed or nailed" in the end, all just waiting for the apocalypse, trumpeted by the muse just flown in from Arizona, the die rolled in the desert, arid chance... and against all this the poet builds a "confederacy of words", a community built on lyrical foundations... a communion of hard-eyed contemplation. This is an idealistic poetry, one in which the "lyrics know no border, or rather the best know every border and wing way beyond".

But also there's something older being fashioned here - a kind of leftish nostalgia, Oysterish, hardening itself inside against the Baudrillardian wars on tv, longing for a more real, more solid England, glimpsed in bits (and, disgustingly, in pixels), a stone honesty and regionalism - "this country is not our fault". We're warned of the bombast to come: "blanket of flesh" and blankets of words, the lost sureness of foot replaced by a randomness of smart imagery, sentences chewing at their own tails, distant lobby groups are cursed, the evangelist is ranting in the best 'druidic' manner, denouncing, undoing, but the targets are vague, far away, the protests are soon shifted from the huge ideological runways and the old image - the dead soldier rises - itself rises, the living dead die and live again: "do Communists exist anymore?" No. But they can still be nostalgic for Cold War uncertainties, blues politics, defensive, survivalist, Jesus hooded and in orange overalls, piling the images around their subject, a language apocalypse without a button, a bonfire that isn't lit.

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