2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Richard Thompson albums tend to be reliable things. As a musician, Thompson has made a virtue of reaching and maintaining a particular level of quality, and thus always meeting expectations. While Thompson’s albums are never formulaic, there’s sometimes a sense that he’s been tilling the same soil across the decades—but pan out to check the flow of his entire career, and the breadth of his address is surprising.
Ship To Shore is Thompson’s 20th solo album, not counting his time with Fairport Convention in the late ‘60s, a run of startling and incomparably moving albums with ex-wife Linda Thompson in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, two albums with French, Frith, Kaiser, & Thompson in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Now in his sixth decade of music-making, Thompson’s worked away assiduously at a sturdy kind of songwriterliness that carries within it, generally implicitly, his deep understanding of folk music; his guitar playing, similarly, is underpinned by a kind of diligence that, nonetheless, allows for the sparkle of the unexpected, the spirit of improvisation.
Thompson is also excellent at detailing the everyday bleakness of life quietly lived, and Ship To Shore is full of moments where his songs’ protagonists are left noiselessly hanging by a thread. “What’s Left To Lose” is perhaps the pinnacle of Ship To Shore in this respect, not just because it’s one of the album’s most assured performances, but because the bittersweet tang of the longing in the lyrics and Thompson’s vocal delivery are matched by slippery webs of guitar playing that seem in some abstruse way to document the equally tangled thinking of the character at the center of the song’s story.
If this makes Ship To Shore read as a heavy trip, well, that’s part of what you get with Richard Thompson. But there’s also sly humor, and the mordant dryness of the observations about the human condition is balanced by Thompson’s spirited, deeply committed playing, and supported by a band that understands how his songs develop. The folksier touches, such as the reel-like melody that welcomes the album into earshot on “Freeze,” to the weeping folk violin on album closer “We Roll,” are deployed beautifully; the quieter songs, like the lush yet biting “Singapore Sadie,” benefit from a relaxed, almost becalmed musicianship that gifts Thompson a perfect bed for his more celestial songs. In essence, then, another great album from someone who’s already made more than his share.
