Not content with being larger-than-life, Lou Reed now wants to be larger-than-death. Or so it would seem from Magic And Loss, an album which finds a vengeful Lou eye-balling The Grim Reaper with a ferocity and pitch that could well, raise the dead.

Whether he wins or not is a moot point but, either way, the stand-off makes for one of the most compelling works of art that you're likely to encounter this or any other year.

Of course, when you find reviewers referring to a record as a "work of art" it's usually time to reach for your gun. But I'd plead for leniency in this case and argue that here the description is more than justified. Magic And Loss is self-consciously a concept project dealing with a Big theme – a 14 song suite which examines humanity's mortality or, as Reed himself puts it, "a life-lesson about how to deal with loss".

The whole thing is wide open to charges of pretension pomposity and plain wankiness (especially when you consider that all of the tracks come with sub-heads like 'The Thesis' and 'The Summation). However, the buttomline is that the album's emotional impact belies its artifice. Just as venom is drawn from an adder and transformed into an antidote to snakebites, so Reed has managed to create something that is ultimately life-affirming and celebratory, by sucking the blood and marrow from his fear of death.

Like Berlin and the rest of the best of the Reed canon, Magic And Loss is built on a blueprint of specifics, real events in Reed's own life. It centres around the deaths from cancer of two close friends: Doc Pomus (a legendary songwriter who co-wrote songs for Elvis. The Drifters and Dion And The Belmonts) and an old girlfriend he describes simply as "a woman called Rite". With a forensic eye for detail and decay. Reed catalogues their final days in a series of songs on Side One that are unrelenting in their grimness, but strangely uplifting nonetheless.

The album opens with a defiant guitar salvo called 'Dorita' (as in Doc and Rita) before slipping into 'What's Good – The Thesis', a sardonic and refreshingly upbeat track which seems to serve as both a warning and a steeling-of-the-will for the harrowing realities to come.

With 'Power And The Glory – The Situation', the long slide towards the icy, marmoreal cold of the crematorium slab begins: "I saw a great man turn into a little child/The cancer reduced him to dust/His voice growing weak as he fought for his life/With a bravery few me know/I saw isotopes introduced into his lungs/Trying to stop the cancerous spread…"

This is the first of several individually brilliant songs on the album, songs that would be equally affecting outside the immediate context of 'Magic And Loss'. It also sets the sonic tone for the rest of the proceedings with its bare guitar wreaths, skin-tight bass and occasional polyps of percussion. In such sparse surroundings every mote and speck of sound has to pay its way and Reed along with fellow pall-bearers, Michael Rathke, Rob Wasserman and Michael Blair, genuinely play as if their lives depended on it.

The descent continues with 'Magician – Internally', another musical study in strain and a further catalogue of atrophy with an attention to detail worthy of a medical dictionary: "Somebody please hear me/My hand can't hold a cup of coffee/My fingers are weak – things just fall away".

'Swords Of Damocles – Externally' comes with a melodic urgency and flair that slowly winds the listener into its bleak meditation on the ironic catch 22 of chemotherapy: "Radiation kills both good and bad/It cannot differentiate, so to cure you they must kill you". And so on, through 'Goodbye Mass – In A Chapel Bodily Termination"(!) and 'Cremation – Ashes to Ashes’, songs of heft and edge that continue the tale of human disintegration with an unflinching bluntness.

Accusations of morbidity and creative cannibalism are inevitable, but there's something about Reed's sureness of touch and the power of the material that stops things ever toppling over into crass voyeurism.

'Dreamin' – Escape' at the end of Side One and all the traces on Side Two concern themselves with Reed's own responses to bereavement, as he moves through various stages of regret, revenge, hurt, guilt, humility and finally towards some sort of bloodied-but-unbowed resignation. These songs could well have been the weakest on the album, self-indulgent howls of incoherent rage. But again, Reed's vast experience and sheer craftsmanship carry him through and he manages to baste all of these conflicting emotions with a refreshing clarity and style.

His pistelero savvy as a musician also ensures that there are always enough of his characteristically taut guitar lines on which to peg the verbiage. Particularly impressive are the sulphuric anger of 'The Warrior King – Revenge' and the purgative blues of ‘Magic And Loss – The Summation' which finds Lou going some way towards accepting his own feet of clay: "They say no one person can do it all/But you want to in your head/But you can't be Shakespeare and you can't be Joyce/So what is left instead?/You're stuck with yourself/And a rage that can hurt you/You have to start at the beginning again".

It's also worth noting that Reed's bone dry wit hasn't deserted him, eve in the face of such turmoil. This is not the album to put the "fun" into funeral but it still has flashes of great black humour, especially on 'Harry's Circumcision – Reverie Gone Astray'.

Nevertheless, there are moments on Magic And Loss when you'll find yourself pleading with Lou Reed to give it a rest and lighten up. You'd give anything if, even briefly, he'd put you out of his misery. However, there are also moments that will stop you in your tracks, dead in your tracks, and compel you to think. And let's face it, there's fuck all else in rock music that you can say that about. With a single bound. Reed has made all the other so-called major songwriters look just like so many huffers and puffers who are in no danger of blowing anyone's house down.

Magic And Loss may not be for everybody, but for those who can identify with what Reed is talking about, it's well nigh indispensable.