Of course this is excellent, and the rumbustious electric guitar tracks are full of trademark note bends and riff-sprints as only Thompson can play them. These are so often folk and punkrock sounds thrown together, with Thomspon’s lyrical elocution lessons anchoring them firmly to their Englishness.
And in this vein: I have always been a sucker for his
ballads, the sadder and more miserable and cynical the better wrapped in their
beauty - yet again, it is the enunciation that makes them so distinctive [well,
the songwriting is simply as first-class as ever, so there has to be something
else to write about]. It is as if the consonants will not depart from his lips
without the absolute onomatopoeic torque of their noise having been pre-set then
sprung with linguistic gusto. This can be taken to composition and
pronunciation extremes: in The Snow
Goose, an exquisite song, the line in
the dream I am running down a street of molasses has that final syrupy word both over-deliberate as a metaphor but also in Thompson's sung pronunciation of
the full o vowel sound, its syllabic pace also
slowed so that every emphasis on word and sound is highlighted. Perhaps that
primary school up-North which has banned local vernacular in children’s talk
will be piping his singing into classrooms on Thompson Tannoys....
Across the two cds of the deluxe edition, these are the
slower songs for those who, like me, might want to create alternative set
lists: The Snow Goose, I Found a Stray,
My Enemy, Another Small Thing In Her Favour, Saving The Good Stuff For You.
And if you think I’ve gone completely soft, I can also
recommend the stompers Sally B and Stuck On The Treadmill, this latter with amazing guitar and bass in-tandem romping. But really, both
cds are full of Thompson excellence, and produced to perfection by that other
great, Buddy Miller.
No comments:
Post a Comment