For over half a century, British guitarist Richard Thompson has been creating albums filled with curious characters, loving laments, dark chords, dark humor, and peerless guitar work.
This makes each release a cause for celebration, as is the case with his new album “Ship to Shore.” The album ends a five-year recording hiatus, the longest hiatus of Thompson’s career. His generally prolific pace slowed in part due to the album’s completion. One of his compelling 2021 memoirs, “Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975.”
“Ship to Shore” was worth the wait because the album meets his consistently high standards while also sounding like no other. He’s never sung better, and his jagged solos are succinct and unremittingly awe-inspiring.
Thompson produced the set, which was recorded in Woodstock, New York. It features a cracking rhythm section from bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome. David Mansfield occasionally provides violin.
Thompson’s mood is, as usual, sombre. Most of her music is in the minor key and she sings about demons and ghosts, fears and fears, hard times, PTSD and heartache, and a lot of it. Love is blinding, it confuses, it goes wrong and it melts away. “Romance is overrated,” he concluded in the song “Trust.”
There’s a bit of a British feel, as when Thompson sings flirty and dirty rhymes with flirty and dirty on “Maybe.” It’s an unusually bouncy song reminiscent of the 1965 pop charts, veered into wild legs. He explores his interest in Renaissance music in “The Old Pack Mule,” a song with appropriately brutal guitars and a sing-a-long chorus.
Other highlights include ‘Turnstile Casanova’, driven by bright guitar hooks and upbeat singing, and ‘Life’s a Bloody Show’, a tale of a dead soul resembling ‘Fergus Laing’, the clown villain from a 2015 Thompson song. The same name soon became embroiled in real-life events.
The set opens with “Freeze,” a shack and a call to active living. Thompson, 75, followed that advice and, in the final “We Roll,” reflects on life out of a suitcase, a result of a still busy concert schedule.
“He must be crazy,” thinks the Road Warrior, but he has a new song to sing.
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