Gold Brick.

GOLD BRICK Jon Langford (Roir, 2006)

In three quick decades Jon Langford has gone from helping invent punk rock with his old college band The Mekons to performing, on his most recent solo album, an earnest, gutsy cover of Procol Harum's interminable sea chanty, "Salty Dog."

A long, strange trip, indeed, but it gets stranger. He also has moved from Leeds, England to Chicago, fronted a country-rock bar band (the Waco Brothers), and developed a thriving career as a painter of cowboy pictures. Meanwhile, the Mekons, who still reunite every few years, added a fiddler and accordionist, and recorded an album of "electronica" dance music.

Langford's brilliant career defies easy summary. But for the uninitiated, Gold Brick is as good a place to start as any. A literal love affair brought Langford to Chicago, but since then another has blossomed with country music, and this new album continues the romance. With their lilting, folk-derived melodies floating on waves of piano and violin, these 12 songs are certainly the most accessible work of Langford's career. In other words, the album bears not a trace of the singer's punk rock origins. But it does, like his other solo work, give us a direct look into the soul of a displaced English socialist in love with his new country and simultaneously baffled and enraged by it.

The album cover bears the subtitle "Lies of the Great Explorers or Columbus at Guantanamo Bay." Those political themes are expressed with subtle irony in "Gorilla and the Maiden" (a King Kong tale in which "a hundred investors in hairy suits paw at a city served up in chains") and the migrant's tale, "Dreams of Leaving." But the closing track, "Lost in America" (composed for the National Public Radio show This American Life) is more typical of the Langford catalog, as it swings through a rock-hard version of American history from Columbus to John Henry to Abu Ghraib.