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Music > Albums > Richard Thompson - The Old Kit Bag (2003) Retail CD
added on July 3, 2007, at 16:43 by Sarge!

One studio album every three years is beginning to seem like a guarantee that every new Richard Thompson release will be a gold-plated delight. The Old Kit Bag arrives three years after Mock Tudor, which in turn appeared three years after You? Me? Us?. And if not exactly a trilogy, the three taken together represent some of his most consistently rewarding work. On the new album Thompson is unusually relaxed--indeed he's positively genial in places--and even when he dials the mood down it's done with deliciously self-mocking irony ("I've got no right to have it all"). In the country-inflected "Sight Unseen" he actually goes so far as to sing of love without bitterness, and only with "Outside of the Inside" do his lyrics really sting ("God never listened to Charlie Parker / Charlie Parker lived in vain / Blasphemer, womaniser / Let a needle numb his brain"). Musically The Old Kit Bag employs a stripped-down band and back-to-basics production reminiscent of early Fairport and as on those albums acoustic folk instruments ("One Door Opens") here rub shoulders with that inimitable electric guitar ("A Love You Can't Survive", for example). Danny Thompson does his solid thing on double-bass (check out the wonderfully languid "First Breath" and "Got No Right"), while Judith Owen's backing softens Thompson's familiar gruff vocals. Like every Richard Thompson album this one's a grower, but it's well worth the effort. --Mark Walker

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