7/10

Mortal Prophets have never sounded especially interested in standing still within their aesthetic. Each release from John Beckmann’s New York project has treated genre as something temporary, adopting a mood long enough to explore it before slipping into another room entirely. And on 'Ain’t No Fool', that restlessness becomes the album’s organising principle.

Across fifteen compact tracks, none stretching beyond three minutes, Beckmann moves through post-punk, garage-rock, psychedelic pop and bruised romanticism without allowing any one style to settle into permanence. The songs arrive quickly, establish their own peculiar worlds and disappear before they can become overly familiar. It gives the record the pace of a collection of short stories: connected by voice and atmosphere, but each carrying a different character, joke or emotional complication.

‘I Am Your Lover’ opens with a directness that is immediately complicated by what follows. While ‘I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head’ turns intimacy into something unstable, questioning whether the object of affection ever existed beyond imagination. And that uncertainty continues through ‘In My Dreams’, helping establish an album where romance frequently sits one step away from delusion.

Elsewhere, ‘Elementary Menace’ brings childhood anxiety into an adult world without sanding away its absurdity. ‘My Addictions’ uses processed vocals and a degree of self-mockery to address compulsion without lapsing into confessional solemnity, while ‘Dreaming I’m A Rock Star’ takes aim at the myths artists construct around themselves. Its humour works because Beckmann clearly understands the attraction of those myths even as he dismantles them.

The record's title-track provides one of the record’s firmest statements. ‘Ain’t No Fool’ carries the confidence of someone who has accumulated enough poor decisions to recognise danger earlier than before. It's not necessarily a claim of wisdom, but a distinction that suits an album consistently suspicious of grand declarations.

Following the hazier textures of 'Hide Inside the Moon' and 'Not Here, Not There', this album feels sharper and more mischievous. Its brevity keeps the ideas moving, while its rougher garage-rock edge gives the artist's literary instincts a more physical foundation.

'Ain’t No Fool' is strange, economical and deliberately difficult to categorise. Here, Mortal Prophets don't attempt to solve life’s contradictions. They simply turn up the guitars, raise an eyebrow and invite them into the songs themselves.