You never quite know what you’re going to get with Richard Thompson, but some things remain the same: the self-lacerating lyrics, the understated but masterful guitar playing, and the palette that encompasses seemingly everything from his folk roots to carefully deployed Middle Eastern influences.
Ship To Shore, his nineteenth solo album, on which he’s backed by a supremely taut band, is his most rumbustious in years.
Lyrically, opener Freeze is as bleak as Ian Curtis (‘Another day without a dream, without a hope, without a scheme/ Another day that finds you crawling on your knees’), but it’s set against a fierce percussive backdrop akin to a the blackest of sea shanties.
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It’s proof that at the age of 75 Thompson can still startle. Elsewhere he’s scuzziness itself on Old Pack Mule, while Maybe climaxes with a fearsome guitar squall midway between Jerry Garcia and John Frusciante, and Life’s A Bloody Show is quietly incandescent. He’s peaking again.
