“Thompson is 61, and he’ll still kick your a-- .”

That’s a line from Rolling Stone magazine’s review of Richard Thompson’s latest album, “Dream Attic.” The critic, Will Hermes, was referring to Thompson’s blistering, innovative,sometimes mind-bending guitar work.

Such praise is certainly nothing new for Thompson. His fiery fretboard excursions — and his brilliant songwriting — have been receiving such hosannas from critics and fans for 40 years, ever since his Fairport Convention days.

Sometimes, on his studio albums, Thompson — who comes to the Michigan Theater with a full band on Tuesday — has downplayed his guitar virtuosity, choosing instead to put the songs front and center, and then saving the guitar pyrotechnics for his live shows.

But on “Dream Attic,” we get the best of both worlds. Although all the songs are new, Thompson decided to record them live, in front of an audience — in this case, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco last winter.

So, we’re treated to another collection of Thompson’s alternately harrowing, brooding, caustic and sardonically funny songs, but we also get the feverish intensity of his extended guitar solos — not to mention the out-of-this world performances by sax / flute player Pete Zorn and violinist Joel Zifkin, as they engage in adventurous duels with Thompson’s guitar.

“I was thinking that it would be a different approach, a different way of achieving what we wanted,” Thompson told ClashMusic.com, referring to the decision to record the album live. “The feedback that I often get from fans is….‘We prefer the live records to the studio records.’ I thought, ‘Let’s test this a little further by taking an album of new material and recording it live….Just bypass the studio process…..’”

As a writer, Thompson has always been acutely sensitive to human frailty, and many of his songs over the years have dug deeply into the darker corners of the human condition. On “Dream Attic,” he displays that gift on songs like the heart-tugging lament “A Brother Slips Away,” the ominous “Crimescene,” and “If Love Whispers Your Name” — which begins pensively, but explodes with anger at the end. Listen to Richard Thompson "Big Sun Falling In The River" (MP3).

He also has a little fun with a satirical jab at a real-life pop star who is amusingly depicted as complacent and self-righteous in the spritely “Here Comes Geordie.” (The Guardian, the London newspaper, claimed that the pop star in question is Sting.)

Writing in tongue-in-cheek fashion about romantic travails has long been another Thompson specialty, and he mines that vein here with “Bad Again,” which includes lines like: “You talk about your mother, dear, all the time / And I can’t stop from yawning…..Put a TV in the doghouse and my favorite chair / Spend so much of my time in there….”

Thompson’s talent and inclination for sharp social commentary is also on display, with the punchy “The Money Shuffle,” in which he skewers the big Wall Street investment banks whose greed and criminal behavior triggered the recession that has crippled the global economy for the last two years.

“Some things just p--- me off,” Thompson told ClashMusic. “If you get mad at something you can normally write very quickly. When you see people being that greedy, it can be the starting point for a song” — which, in this case, he said, refers to an issue “that has affected everyone’s life, and certainly affected me enough to write" the song.

One local Thompson admirer is Colleen Moore of Dexter — a former free-lance contributor to Dirty Linen, the folk-music mag that took its name from a Fairport song, and which folded this year.

“Thompson can take a simple song and makes it bigger than what it might be, infusing it with majesty and importance,” says Moore. “It's a combination of deceptively simple stories and that amazing guitar that combine to pack a big punch. And then he does something like ‘Waltzing's for Dreamers,’ which couldn't be more lyrical and wistful. The diversity of his artistic range is astonishing. Unfortunately, these great talents are hard to pigeonhole, which is why he is still relegated to ‘cult status.’”

On “Dream Attic,” Zifkin’s violin is so prominent that it evokes Dave Swarbrick’s signature, exhilarating fiddle playing on those classic ‘60s-‘70s-era Fairport records. In that sense, “Dream Attic” is very much a Brit-Celt folk-rock record — a genre that Fairport helped “invent,” back in the day, along with Steeleye Span.

And many of the melodies here are steeped in the Brit-Celt folk tradition that Thompson grew up with: He’s from London, but his father was Scottish and was also a musician. And when Zorn is playing flute, he bolsters that sensibility. But when he’s delivering one of his alternately blowzy, skronking or punchy sax solos or fills, he helps take the music to another place entirely.

On “Sidney Wells” — the most exciting track on the album — drummer Michael Jerome hammers out a double-time, syncopated, almost martial-sounding groove, while Zorn’s sax and Zifkin’s violin conjure some heady Middle Eastern exotica. Of course, Thompson’s signature guitar sound has always evoked the drone quality that is common to both Celtic and Arabic music, and he ups that ante here.

The track is quite thrilling: Thompson, Zifkin and Zorn seem to egg each other on: the intensity of the song builds and builds, as Thompson delivers extended solos that are slashing, rippling, strafing and intoxicating.

Meanwhile, the sweetly melancholic “Among the Gorse, Among the Grey” has a decided Celt-music influence, with its moody atmospherics, rolling drums and Zifkin’s pensive violin.

On the aforementioned “Bad Again,” Thompson initially uses his guitar to decorate his vocals, and his first solo almost veers into country-style chicken-pickin’ territory. Then, his second solo lifts the song into the stratosphere, leading to a nimble series of spiraling, dovetailing solos from Zorn, Zifkin and Thompson, as they dodge and feint around each other in head-spinning fashion.

In a recent interview with Current magazine, Thompson discussed his mindset and creative process when it comes to crafting his mind-blowing solos. “You might think about the underlying chord sequence of the solo,” he said. “You might store some ideas in your copious spare time, just to see what the possibilities are. When it comes to actually playing the solo, I think you have that kind of information embedded and you just kind of shovel that out of your conscious mind and just explore, and just see where it takes you.”

Or, put another way, it’s easy if you know how.

Kevin Ransom, a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com, first wrote about Richard Thompson for the Ann Arbor News in 1991. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.

Richard Thompson performing live earlier this month: