It's been five years since Julian Cope, the former leader of the Teardrop Explodes, has had a full-length album out in America. Saint Julian reintroduces him as an artist of stature: self-invented, self-assured, ready to take on the world. Given the religious allusions that crop up on this album and Cope's titular sainthood, the words second coming don't seem entirely out of place.

Fully...

A plain acoustic guitar strums as Julian Cope announces Jehovahkill's opening cut, "Soul Desert"; the bass goes thud, you hear papers rustling, then Cope begins: "I was lost and loveless in your soul desert/I was packed and kicking into your alien land." The effect is straight from the one-take "Las Vegas Basement," the sad-eyed closing track from Cope's last album, Peggy Suicide...

Julian Cope is, as the English say, barking mad. Off his trolley. Utterly daft. He has been a confessed enthusiast of hallucinogenic leisure substances and is an avowed disciple of such legendary loose screws as Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson and Jim Morrison. During one memorable concert in Britain several years ago, he accidentally snapped his mike stand in two and then, in a bloody frenzy, lacerate...

"I shit on your reason/Your rose is my thorn," rails Brit eccentric and ecowarrior Julian Cope on Autogeddon's title track. Third in the apocalypse trilogy that includes Peggy Suicide and Jehovahkill, this chapter fuses techno-horror imagery (automobiles spontaneously combusting) and whisper-to-a-scream musical dynamics in an attack on the "greedhead" cabal that Cope blames for trashing the...