As a fan for over twenty years, I have come to expect a certain amount of that odd sense of humor in each album. I was not disappointed with "Life'll Kill Ya". I laughed out loud during "For My Mext Trick I'll Need a Volunteer", and Elvis is alive in "Porcelain Monkey". I think my favorite is "My S**t's F**ked Up", because it's the first time those words have been used in a song for reasons other that shock or punctuation. There really are no other words that can be used in the song and leave it with the same meaning, let alone humor. I can't pick a favorite Zevon album, but this ranks up there as a quality piece of work. The only slightly negative I could think of is that it ends slow. Then again the complaint may be that it ends at all. This is as good as or better than anything on the radio or in the stores.

Okay, I'm a huge Warren Zevon fan (I don't think I'm alone on this one), but I'd been disappointed by his last three offerings. Mr. Bad Example, though sporting some great songs, was a bit too uneven for me--it had the feeling of someone going through the motions. Learning to Flinch, like most live albums, was mere product (nothing like his truly stunning Stand in the Fire). And Mutineer was...well...just a failed effort: too many computerized tricks trying to dress up songs that weren't all that great to begin with.

I'm happy to admit that Zevon's back! I bought this album with trepidation, fearing the the Z-man would present us with just another okay, good-but-not-great record. I feared that, maybe, Zevon was getting a tad too old and that, like so many other rock stars over 40, he was starting to show signs of wear-and-tear. I've been proved 100% wrong. As another review noted before, this is Zevon's best since Sentimental Hygiene (his last GREAT record). Warren's back and he's as cynical as ever. Yes, I like the title track and For My Next Trick I'll Need a Volunteer. But what really wins me over are the songs here that I would NEVER have guessed Warren could write or sing. I'll Slow You Down contains one of the catchiest riffs I've heard, and Warren's singing takes chances that pays huge rewards. Throw in a downbeat, melancholy cover of Steve Winwood's upbeat, bouncy worldwide smash hit, and I find myself grinning from ear to ear.

After several years out of the 'scene,' Warren Zevon played a tape of his new songs for Jackson Browne. Browne asked him who he was making an album for, and Zevon told him "no one." A few calls later, Zevon had a deal with Danny Goldberg's Artemis Records, and I'm sure no fan has ever been sorry.

He blasts us in the face from the get-go, with the Dylanesque folk fire of "I Was In the House When the House Burned Down," takes us through a couple of more-or-less typical Zevon moments (the title track, "I'll Slow You Down"), and then slaps us with "Hostage-O," a plea for help coming from the side of everyone who feels remote and emotionally helpless. ("You can treat me like a dog if you make me feel like others feel.") Brilliant.

He winds up the album with "Don't Let Us Get Sick." At the time it was sad and poignant, now it just wipes you out. ("Don't let us get sick/Don't let us get old/Don't let us get stupid, all right?/Just let us be brave/And make us play nice/And let us be together tonight.")

His observations are offset by sparse, mostly folky accompaniment (acoustic guitar, bass, percussion..a little piano).

Powerful, pungent, emotionally raw and fantastic.

Contrary to the title, the acerbic wit that gave the world "Excitable Boy," "Werewolves of London," and "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" is quite alive and well, and this album is evidence enough of it. With his cocked sense of humor and enough plaintiveness to keep you guessing, Zevon delivers charmingly disturbed music that you can`t keep out of your CD player or tape deck. Check out the magician analogies to relationships in "For My Next Trick I`ll Need a Volunteer" or the Vegas-era Elvis put-down "Porcelain Monkey," just to name a couple. Also, Zevon's singularly wistful reading of Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life" isn't a cover, it's an outright kidnapping. Of course, being Warren Zevon, he follows up that remarkable performance with a track whose title could not be printed on the album jacket. Zevon's warped, wiseass lyrical perspectives are fully engaged on songs like "I Was In The House When The House Burned Down" and "Live'll Kill Ya," to riotous effect. All told, the entire Zevon experience is on display here, and that's a damn good thing.

Some artists are born with a divine vocation to enrich the meaning of our lives. A most personal, intimate revelation from such an artist will evolve into a universal light - an intense showering of sparks from one who is/was, as Kerouac would say, born to "burn, burn, burn like a fabulous roman candle". Warren had his one and only hit record in 1978: history's most literate party song, "Werewolves Of London". On the album, Life'll Kill Ya", Zevon begins with the concept of a the faded and jaded rock star, presumably inspired by the liberation from his former label and the disappointment of two massive commercial failures, "Mutineer" and "Mr Bad Example" (despite being two of his best albums). This premise affords his deepest self-examination. The universal light, however, from this album is the laughing-in-the-face of death relentless visionquest for truth and beauty in the life.

"I Was In The House When The House Burned Down" comes closer to telling Zevon's life story than any other song in his catalogue. It only recently occurred to me that part of the magic of the song lies in the way it elucidates how generations of people fought the good fight until the Seventies gave them the choice between the devil (go into advertising, publishing, the film industry, moderate politics or corporate rock) and the Lord, literally, because "you gotta serve somebody", even if you happen to be Bob Dylan. Zevon sings, with the conviction of someone who lived his own words, "I was in house when the house burned down / I met the man with the thorny crown / I helped him carry his cross through town". Yes, sometimes the holiest of holiest vocations will make a martyr out of you. This song is the best folk-rock you will ever hear, built around blazing harmonica and acoustic rhythm guitar.

The title track is introduced by a Randy Newman-esque piano solo - a whimsical melody cutting through the centre of the song and sustaining it. Zevon sings about death but his meaning, again, applies to life. In a song that also refers to "awful, awful diseases" which would later, ironically, seize upon him, there is something so pretty about the simple words, "Life'll find you wherever you go".

Sounding the most like the kind of material that first made Zevon famous, that unashamed easy West-Coast FM swagger and sway, "Porcelain Monkey" is the flip-side to "Graceland": "He threw it away for a porcelain monkey ...It's a rockabilly ride from the glitter to the gloom ... He traded it in for a night in Las Vegas ..." But where is the light? The chosen imagery conjures up Faustian implications and beckons the question: what price for a soul?

The best account I can give of "For Next Trick I'll Need A Volunteer" and its catholic quality is to say it has been, since the very first time I heard it, the only song I want played at my funeral. It is also fitting that I played the song incessantly on repeat when I personally fulfilled my life-long dream of directing my first feature film. It's that kind of song. Everyone one of us knows the feeling it captures: "It's lonely up here/When the tricks have been played/And the spotlights have faded". Zevon's humor balances perfectly with a humble, sad guitar strum and more breathy harmonica.

On "I'll Slow You Down" Zevon allows his vocals to be frail and it is incredibly evocative; a work of greater honesty and genuine human emotion than its closest relative - John Lennon's "Crippled Inside".

"Hostage-O" is the big love ballad. Sort of. It would be impossible to be more open-hearted and lay it all on the line: "I can see me bound and gagged / Dragged behind the clownmobile / You can treat me like a dog / If you make me feel what others feel". It's a love song, all right: one written for his fans.

"Dirty Little Religion" is a deliriously delicious up-tempo blues that strikes at the very heart of rock and roll, merging the sacred and the secular, just like Elvis, Ray Charles, Prince and the masters that came before them: "I'll make a dirty little religion out of lovin'".

Normally, a cover version would be out of place, especially on a masterpiece, but Zevon makes "Back In The High Life Again" his own. Although a gentle, quiet translation, the song still resonates much louder than Steve Winwood's original because Zevon is equal parts blessed and burdened with the gift and grasp of irony.

"My S***'s F***** up" starts out like a classic Groucho Marx routine: "I went to the doctor / I said I'm feeling kinda rough / Let me break it to you, son / Your s***'s f***** up". How can you not love it? The words, themselves, make the music; it's a talking blues like the kind Dylan perfected on "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan".

"Fistful Of Rain", a very fine folk waltz, further endears and defines Zevon's whole Quixotic visionquest: "In a heart there are windows and doors / You can let the light in / You can feel the wind blow / When there's nothing to lose / And nothing to gain / Grab a hold of that fistful of rain".

The beauty is in the chase, even when you are chasing the holy grail, itself, as Zevon and his protagonists do in "Ourselves To Know". Ever so compassionately, he extends the metaphor to include himself and his peers, many of whom didn't survive the journey of life: "Everyone got famous / Everyone got rich / Everyone went of the rails and landed in a ditch". Zevon's vocal performace here is one of the best of his entire career. He still sounds smart but he has never sounded more impassioned.

And "Don't Let Us Get Sick" is one of the best songs Zevon has ever written; indeed, one of the greatest songs ever written. He may still snarl a little when he sings "Don't let us get stupid all right" and, let's face it, he, more than any other artist in past 30 years, has suffered the injustice that emanates from the inherent shallowness of popular culture. But there is no bitterness here, whatsoever. There is, instead, humanity beyond measure, rejoicing in the pan-ultimate beauty and truth of living: "The moon has a face / And it smiles on the lake / And causes the ripples in Time / I'm lucky to be here / With someone I like / Who maketh my spirit to shine".

Zevon was often considered obtuse and aloof by more mainstream critics, who were all too slavish to popular culture and mindless trends. Some said he was too clever for his own good, in that annoying way like a car with buttons for everything. With "Life'll Kill Ya", he laid his heart bare and unleashed an inspirational blood-letting that proved once and for all how human he was, like the rest of us. The album is heartbreaking and heart-warming, all at once. Not only is "Life'll Kill Ya" the best album Zevon ever made, it is one of the greatest recordings you'll ever hear.