1999 was a watershed year for the durable art-rock trio Scopdom Scop, featuring the simultaneous releases of their third greatest hits compilation, A Look Back, and the breathtaking Victory, a disc that seemed at the time an epitome of everything they had done on the first twenty-odd albums, only better. After a two-year hiatus, the Midwestern alternative legends have finally brought out their 25th (silver?) release, the long-rumored Like as the Mule, an ambitious 2-CD set (over two hours of music) that is destined to become one of the forgotten classics of rock and roll. Mike Zugin’s lyrics, Bob Brink’s vocals, and John Nelles’s instrumentation, arrangements, and production have never attempted more or achieved it so completely.

They lead in with “Elsie,” a preview in miniature of the album’s effective switching between contrasting genres and modes. It opens and closes with acoustic music, with a haunting folksy intro that mutates into a stalking jazzy outro (right down to the vibes), bridged by a meaty power-pop core. Noon follows midnight without transition with the straight-ahead rocker “Twag,” which melds some of Zugin’s most violent lyrics (“Rebels and I covered/And listened to the hammer/Crucified”) with molten metal guitar riffs and an electronics-influenced drum attack. In the bluesy and elegiac “Sprite Horse” Nelles lets the listener unclench for a few minutes as he textures keyboards over acoustic guitars in a sonic backdrop for Zugin’s meditation on life and its passing: “Crystal waters/And death by golden street lights.” Peace returns to war with the thousand-pound shithammer “Spotlight,” a stadium rocker with an instantly recognizable hook that will doubtless soon be excerpted in commercials for some particularly aggressive beer company. The wall of sound thickens as it goes, Nelles layering just enough guitars over the organ to get it dirty but not muddy, never pulling the punch of the individual strokes. Brink has done to his voice in twenty years what took Dylan forty, and he dumps the whole nine yards of gravel in his pipes to drive the track harder verse by verse. A sparser production and more relaxed vocal style provide a neo-industrial-country feel (say if Gram Parsons had joined The Move instead of The Byrds) as punctuation while Zugin’s lyrics assume the focus in “The ME Backs.” He takes his distinctive expressionistic surrealism on a trip to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, literally inventing his own language out of scraps and chips from other dialects, dreams, and puns: “Gir Heirds Gallons/Litheyes My Onel/Side Car Day/Ther Equel Twons/There RIDE Tres.” Brink has been interpreting Zugin’s lyrics for so long that he can deliver even these “words” naturally; like Van Morrison, he sings syllables rather than lines, and until you see them on the page they don’t sound strained at all. The shortest piece on the collection, and its undoubted masterpiece, is the instrumental gem “I Than the Tomb More Dread (Excerpt),” Nelles’s long-awaited (and killer) homage to Pet Sounds, which opens with a percussive quote from “Caroline No” before bringing Brian Wilson into the 21st century. Overdue. The first disc wraps up with “The Man,” an instrumental suite with vocal accompaniment à la Uncle Meat-period Zappa.

“Stato” kick-starts side 2 much the way “Satisfaction” did side two of Out of Our Heads, though with the fuzz-tones set at “bagpipe” and the rhythm veering toward a syncopated samba for the dance-along chorus. Brink eschews his trademark croak and shows his range with a melodic tenor register, opening a new window on Zugin’s Stones-strut lyrics (“My Monte Carlo/Will be fitted with/A 20mm cannon”). The slow blues “Steve’s Horse” (there are a lot of horses in this densely symbolic concept album) sets up another crunching rocker, as Brink growls and Nelles howls with guitars feeding back and forth through “Keep Clapping,” the no-brainer choice for the first single to be issued from this opus. The single’s B-side, “The Morning’s Shot,” features another variation of Brink’s voice, at once fluent and conversational, highlighting the poetry (what Zugin calls “The Fishing Rod of the Night Air/in the Germ Of The Mind Rays”) as Nelles mixes the bass high (think Morphine without the sax) and shadows it on slide guitar for a laid-back soundtrack to the psychedelic verbal montage. “Summer Fruit” extends the audio acid trip with electronics and loops to complement Zugin’s probing poetry of the apocalyptic: “Hydrogen bombs/Any article to match the silk, to be necessary/To explode dyed silk second for most hurricanes/A fabric soul.” The penultimate track, “Flood Flame” – whose title neatly encapsulates the series of contrasts and dichotomies that characterize the album’s main themes – is the real closer here (though true aficionados will probably just put the 27-minute organic-vérité experiment “What’s Out Here” on repeat-play after the first week or two). Nelles sets up a beat half military rataplan and half New Orleans shuffle, and lets the organ line guide the melody above Brink’s tense delivery of Zugin’s summation. In definitively open-ended Scop style, he ends without closure in a meditation on resurrection and new beginnings: “Clean your pores/The bells ring/Man of sorrows/Dried with blood/Hark to the smart bell/In his cell.” Zugin deploys the Christian symbolism as one more flavor in his opera about American cultural history, turning against religion as carefully as he turns toward it: “Tinker toys float/In the holy water,” as he so succinctly puts it, including as many beasts and sinners as he does angels and carpenters. The lyrics at the end quote the album’s title in offering a parting philosophical note: “Bear malice/Like a mule…Pamper your flesh/Like as the mule.” Like as the Mule is finally Zugin’s album, driven and shaped by the vision more than the sound, and his binocular view leaves us at its close with a message equally spiritual and hedonistic, as all great rock and roll has always done.