In which the musical renaissance of Don Van Vliet continues apace (and at what a pace). Like 'Shiny Beast' and 'Doc At The Radar Station', Ice Cream For Crow mines the seams first deliriously pick-axed in the 69/70 Trout Mask/Decals period. The emphasis on this latest work harkens back to cuts like 'Orange Claw Hammer', 'Old Fart At Play' and 'Golden Birdies' in its mode of lyrical recitation, a word orgy declaimed, intoned or straight-spoken over more classic Magic Band atonal rock. Along with a couple of exemplar instrumentals the backing series as a soundtrack to a verbal video.

And indeed one could find no more apt a term than 'word-painting' for Beefheart's lexical sallies. A full-time 'straight' painter, his lyrics constantly hop from narrative to intricate visual detail. There are prime examples of this here in the etching of Garland's face on 'Hey Garland, I Did Your Tweed Coat' (itself recalling Trout Mask Replica in its re-introduction of the character 'Pena') – "quick eyebrows danced cutely above a mole/the bridge held a large golf pair of spectacles/the front was smooth/it gradually gathered and wrinkled at the holes/a dark wooden moustache deposited below above Chinese red varnished/lips that dented slightly into the evening." Again it would take a brushperson to conjure "passing cars gum rubber streaks/neon plants swim like green seaweed to a deep rhythm of blues/and thyroid sunsets – flame and speckled chemistry/pipes run off dark tubes/erase into marks that pour the dye of darkness/crystal comes together as silent as ink."

This album basically reveals the Captain's pantheism (and soft Manicheism between 'Sun Zoom Spark' and 'Dr. Dark'), Seven years living in a trailer in the Mojave desert is bound to etch some primal images on the retina, not least the fauneas response to the midday sun and the climb and fading of the moon. Indeed the secret theme of the disc is la luna, the title, 'Ice Cream For Crow' seeming to be a personal synonym for herself: "It's so hot/looks like you have three beaks crow/the moon's so full/white hat on a pumpkin". (Aptly enough, Beefheart's cover painting is a dark moonish extravaganza daubed on a canvas that turns out to be a sun-blind). The compassion 12-inch single released by Virgin, entitled 'Light Reflected Off The Oceands Of The Moon' sums up neatly his flair for neologisms – that 'd' on the end of 'ocean' suggests a diamontine quality all the better to reflect – and the title song thereon – coupled with 'Crow', 'Tropical Hot Dog Night' ("like two flamingos in a fruit fight") and 'Run Paint Run' – turns out to be a howling soprano sax solo that laments its banishment, along with the foxes and dogs, from the moon.

'Ice Cream For Crow', which must be, for the initiate, the most musically accessible and danceable cut, is a bass-thudding swamp music through a gauge of insectile twin guitars which involve a moon-party: "tonight there's gonna be/a feather treatment/beneath the symbol/we'll all assemble/oh how we'll fly/oh how we'll tremble".

'The Host The Ghost The Most Holy-O' ('This is a toast to the ghost…', sing the band to a lopping ritual rhythm), besides nodding to Albert Ayler's 'Holy Ghost', is a moon invocation/world exorcism with the word streamers that paint society as "this pirate flag headlong disaster course vessel/misguided charted this nautical numbskull hull", rejecting Christianity in favour of letting "the moon bell crack and ring/upon the mast of mercy/… the light lovely one with the nothing door/and oh that pours out water". The ecological/anti-nuclear theme is re-activated in this rhythm-recitations of 'The Past Sure Is Tense' and 'Ink Mathematics' ("fission antics/abombastics/death antiques/wrong deductions/poor instructions/mass destructions peace antiques").

Although he draws sparingly on his five-octave vocal range Beefheart's earthy uninhibited rasping is a constant joy. Dr. John (and maybe Tom Waits) are the only other white men who have conjured up the spooks that inhabit the backroads of the American psyche. As a sax-player he is an accessible introduction to Free Jazz, his atonality, unlike the abstract European version, is always rooted, like that of his mentors Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, in the folk blues and r'n'b. Yet Magic Band music is not 'Free' in the accepted sense of the term, but controlled at all times – a point which, as Fred Frith notes, makes it so remarkable – forces that usually emerge in improvisation (and in Beefheart's case – band 'tuition') are harnessed and made constant, repeatable. And while members of the Magic Band serve as pigment in Van Vliet's outrageous designs, the resultant music is a tribute to each ones personal lustre.

Of the Magic Band which made the last album, only steel-appendage guitarist Jeff Morris Tepper and glass-finger guitarist Gary Lucas (who guested on the instrumental 'Flavor Bud Living;) remain. On bass, marimba (that favourite of Beefhearts) and viola is Richard Midnight Hatsize Snyder and on drums and percussion, Cliff R, Martinez. Listen to them go through their paces, as purposefully old as ever, on the instrumentals 'Semi-multicoloured Caucasian' and 'Evening Bell', the latter a classic in the tradition of 'Peon;' and 'A Carrot Is As Close As A Rabbit Gets To A Diamond', where Tepper's burrowing ruminative guitar trips over fractured accents along a solo that scurries into the most obscure crannies of the instrumental range. Throughout, the music suggests the playful spirit of animals, girdled in the strangest of harmonies.

'81 'Poop Hatch' is a spoken recitation sans backing which moves from an evocation of natures endless vortex ("trumpet poop on the ground with peanuts its bell was blocking an ant's vision… and the mice played in its air holes and valves… a ladybug crawled off its mouthpiece standing out red and blacked its wings and flew off to a flower… its hum heard just above the ground…") to a sense of the random inanities of rock'n'roll ("Oh Blobby, you are great").

There are oodles more metaphorical cartwheels in a painter's desert view with the ironic title of 'Cardboard Cutout Sunset' – "You hardly know a day goes by/in the cardboard cutout sundown/the moon popped up like a gallery duck/sipped up gold from the sunny cup/… the bluebottle flies were as big/as a cowboy's eyes/and their buzz was as loud as rattlers".

Finally there is 'The Thousandth And Tenth Day Of The Human Totem Pole', a 'Vision of Myrza' parable that recalls Swift in its satire on human foibles. Over an inscrutable rhythm pattern Beefheart intones a description of an insane society trying to (literally) support itself laterally, detailing the stunted an depressed eating, defecating and exercising routines with absurd humour. "At night the pole would talk to itself/and the chatter wasn't too good/obviously the pole didn't like itself/it wanted to walk". As the appearance of a small child resolves the lyric, the band take off on a priceless effervescent instrumental break, rhythms out of joint, the sax as direct and mysterious as animal talk synthesised bass by Eric Drew Feldman and a sweet guitar coda. Strange melodies from the other side of the tracks.

If you're looking for something to ruffle your musical synaesthesia, this is it.