I wouldn't say 'crass' was quite the word, you could also describe these 12 songs as bitter, angry, funny, paranoid, petulant, sparse, wordy, surprisingly jaunty given the subject matters and none of these are necessarily a bad thing.

What Jeffrey Lewis is actually getting at is punk band Crass, who were, like, proper anarchists back in the late 70s/early 80s, and genuinely politicised, none of that Sex Pistols posing rubbish.

Lewis loves them enough to release an album of Crass covers in antifolk stylee, meaning there's nowt much more that an acoustic, some simple drumming and a return to his earlier days of almost non existent production.

Crass songs are wordy, funny and eloquent and read like plain prose, which presumably are partly responsible for Lewis' lyrical deftness, and what he brings to the party is his NYC drawl, which is all boredom and just-woke-up. Crass' angry and bitter words are numbed by Lewis' monotone singing (I say singing, he's more of a slumbering hound than a nightingale), and I end up guilty for feeling so cheery towards these songs. I can't help it though, and I blame him for making thundering punk tracks into jaunty hodowns.

No doubt that the messages of these songs are 'as relevant today as they were at the time', to coin a true journalistic cliché. Big A Little A starts all nursery rhyme-innocent, before it turns on religion and royalty, Systematic Death reminds us we are all puppets in a world with "free speech for everyone if you've got no voice", Punk Is Dead laments the corporate adoption of the movement - these are not alien song subjects to your 2007 iPod owner.

Should I be getting whipped up into a frenzy by the lack of progress in the last 30 years, if that's Lewis' point? Am I the embodiment of the politically apathetic youth, because I didn't think I was? Whether I am or not, Lewis is paying tribute to his heroes and has created an absolute gem in the process.

4/5