Richard Thompson

★★★★★ Grizzly Man NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP

Nature’s beauty and horror conjured up in the English guitarist’s masterful, reissued score.

Like Miles Davis’s Lift To The Scaffold and Neil Young’s Dead Man, Richard Thompson’s guitar score for Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary about the life (and death) of American film-maker/ bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell was effectively improvised live. Accompanied at various points by Henry Kaiser’s big-noise electric guitar, Jim O’Rourke’s music box piano, plus occasional bass, cello and percussion, Thompson’s guitar moves from Celtic romanticism via unresolved modal melancholy to churning avant noise, seeking the “ecstatic truth” of Herzog’s film, and Treadwell’s tragic story. Now remastered, with the nonThompson track, Coyotes, excised, Thompson’s playing exhibits a narrative and emotional vividness dazzling to behold. “I don’t write about my ‘oneness with nature’”, he once told MOJO. “I have to write about grittier, darker things. The demons that haunt you.” Grizzly Man is proof, if proof were needed, that he can achieve that with guitar alone.