Fairport maestro sailing once more for sadder shores on nineteenth solo LP.
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By Jim Wirth. Illustration by Peter Strain.
Richard Thompson
★★★★ Ship To Shore
NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP
SPIDERING HIS way into the bleakest corner of his first album in six years, Richard Thompson sees through the eyes of a soldier struggling with PTSD on the quietly crushing The Fear Never Leaves You. “Numb is heaven, oblivion wealth,” sings the 75-year-old master of the dark arts in his customar y hangdog fashion. “The spring never uncoils itself.”
A folk rock Sisyphus with a guitar that tends to speak its mind infinitely clearer than he ever can, the lugubrious Fairport Convention founder has once more rolled his immense ball of gloom to the top of the hill for Ship To Shore. It is a record about defeat, despair and humiliation delivered with an unsettling avuncular twinkle, and a lingering sense that the moments when his spring is wound at its tightest might also be the ones where Thompson feels the most alive.
If fellow folk rock boomers Neil Young, Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon have roamed genres, striving to update their profiles, Thompson’s mighty reputation rests on an absolute determination not to broaden his horizons. Since the release of his debut solo LP, Henry The Human Fly, in 1972, his model railway-sized musical universe has never really expanded. He likes British folk, pre-Beatles rock’n’roll, a tiny amount of early R&B, Arabic music and psych-pop (he recently told MOJO that the Left Banke’s awesome debut is one of his faves), and rarely ventures far beyond his comfort zone. It’s a small ‘c’ conser vatism that he shares with such painfully awkward paradigms of British songwriting as Ray Davies, Bryan Ferry, Robyn Hitchcock, Robert Smith and Morrissey, and one that has helped to bring him perhaps the largest collection of four-star album reviews in pop histor y.
Ship To Shore does not strive to change that narrative. After such a long break from recording, there was the possibility that this new record might mark a change of tack, a Time Out Of Mind-style reckoning with mortality, maybe. Instead, it’s a collection that finds comfort in more familiar sensations: inertia, existential dread, and romantic disappointments from the mid-1960s. Be reassured: it’s a winning combination every time.
The four horsemen of Thompson’s apocalypse ride into view on the death’s head cèilidh opener, Freeze. “Another day without a dream, without a hope, without a scheme, another day that finds you crawling on your knees,” he mutters, standing by meekly and watching the warmth being sucked out of the world around him.
Spartan and unshowy, The Fear Never Leaves You brings that chill closer to home,
“Ship To Shore
is a record about defeat, despair and humiliation delivered with an unsettling avuncular twinkle.”