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RICHARD THOMPSON - Sweet Warrior
| Guardian |
| It was 40 years ago this week that Richard Thompson first played with Fairport Convention, and their most celebrated surviving former member is still in rousing, bitter form. He hasn't brought out his electric guitar to work with a band on an album of new songs in four years now, but it has been well worth the wait. He has always specialised in writing about loss, bitterness and horror, and this is one of the most brilliantly gloomy albums in his long career....full text |
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| LA Daily News |
| Thompson changed the way his audience thinks of death, divorce, motorcycles and Britney Spears, so it's hardly surprising he has written a song about the Iraq war that jars the senses. "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" towers over other tunes lamenting the war and stands as the brilliant centerpiece of "Sweet Warrior," the latest superb album in Thompson's four-decade recording career....full text |
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| Slant Magazine |
| Sweet Warrior's ecstatic opener, "Needle And Thread," is Richard Thompson's take on Neil Diamond's classic "Solitary Man." Both catalog the women who've done their man wrong and proclaim a call to self-realization, though Thompson's not-so-subtle phallic imagery ("I'll thread up my needle and then/Gonna sew my soul back together again") is far more colorful than Diamond's matter-of-factness. The guitar and mandolin work are what we've come to expect and love from Thompson: all style, swagger, and nimbleness, bouncing on and off the backing band's beat, and elaborating or disregarding the leitmotifs at will. Nobody plays guitar quite like Thompson: With solos that can save even his weakest songs, and with better tunes that can stack up alongside the best of Dylan's or Cohen's, he's rock n' roll's most dependable recording artist—four decade's worth of albums without a single stinker. ...full text |
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