Dream Attic

Richard Thompson | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 31, 2010)
• Original Release Date: 2010
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Shout Factory!
• ASIN: B003NYVYB4
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,773 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

UK vinyl LP pressing. 2010 release from the veteran British Folk/Rock singer/songwriter. Penned during a short and inspired burst of creative outpouring, the songs were performed during a West Coast tour in February of this year, and the bulk of the performances that made the album come from three shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. "I don't think musicians playing on their own are particularly interesting, it's only when they play in front of an audience that something interesting happens," Thompson said in an interview at one of the shows. The musicians appearing on the album with Thompson are Pete Zorn (guitars, flute, sax, mandolin), Michael Jerome (drums), Taras Prodaniuk (bass), and Joel Zifkin (violin, mandolin). --This text refers to the Vinyl edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still vital after all these years, September 2, 2010

By 

Mark Twang (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream Attic (Audio CD)

This album makes perfect sense. Thompson has never cared for fussy studio production and excels in a live setting, so why not record new material in front of an audience? The recording is excellent, the arrangements are clear and the songs are as strong as any set he's produced in his solo career.

Thompson's songwriting is always masterful at worst. I'd quibble that around the mid-80s he began to repeat himself, as if trying to perfect a certain template. So you get lots of variations on love gone wrong songs, the jaunty, the morose, the false friends songs, the social broadsides. Any classics here? "Sidney Wells" might be his best serial killer song ever. Thompson's scansion is razor sharp, the irony delicious, the rhythm propulsive, the guitar outro ferocious. It's one helluva story song. There seem to be even more songs than usual informed by British folk traditions in structure, style and rhythm. That hasn't always worked ("MGB-GT") but here the musical anachronisms mesh perfectly with the almost all electric rock band. Drummer Michael Jerome, forceful and versatile, has proven himself to be an invaluable asset in recent years.

And if it's Thompson's brilliant, scalding guitar playing you're hankering for, you will not be disappointed. For myself, some of Thompson's studio albums don't have enough guitar ("Mock Tudor", "Amnesia"). But for a gray bearded geezer his playing has been fiercely reinvigorated of late, and there's some breathtaking stuff here. The addition of Joel Zifkin on violin gives Thompson a versatile foil in many arrangements, their interplay on the haunting "Burning Man" is terrific. Some reviewers have complained the set doesn't rock hard enough, but it seems as even handed as any Thompson effort, and in fact rocks harder than most.

Though there's some spare moody stuff, the only unplugged piece is "Among the Gorse" and Thompson doesn't play guitar on it, it's fiddle driven. While it would have been nice to hear some of his acoustic fingerpicking, I can't really gripe when we only get RT electric every few years. The album closes with yet another hard luck love song, "If Love Whispers Your Name". Longtime listeners are way familiar with RT's unsentimental assays on affairs of the heart. But as the lovely, sad waltz melody uncoils under a litany of disappointment Thompson turns the tables on us: "Love is worth every wound / each lonely day / each sleepless night / the price that you pay / to live in the light". Coming from this guy, the affirmation is almost shocking, extraordinary. It's tough, impassioned and winds up to a caterwauling guitar solo of harsh, thrilling beauty. In other words, it's Thompson at his absolute best.

While I'd never want to see RT put on the pedestal of popular acclaim like Dylan or Clapton, he's getting enough visibility that friends who 25 years ago thought I was a raving lunatic pushing "Shoot Out the Lights" on them have come around. "Yeah", they admit, "He's pretty good".

Yeah, he is.

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phenominal as always but....., September 2, 2010

By 

D. russell (Amsterdam) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream Attic (Audio CD)

Do yourself a favor and order the two disc deluxe edition from Amazon UK- only a few dollars more and worth every cent.Disc two contains accoustic demos of the songs on the main disc.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars RT Does it Again!, September 9, 2010

By 

applewood (everywhere and nowhere) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dream Attic (Audio CD)

Having seen Thompson and Band at the first show of this West Coast tour this past winter I knew these songs were going to be good, (what I'm glad to discover now is how good they sound recorded and mixed). What I'd forgotten in the intervening months is how good the band played and how well the new songs fit into his vast body of work... this is classic RT, like he has sounded for....well, several decades now. It is amazing how, that for such a stellar songsmith and guitar player, he always seems to sound best live. And in this case the way he wrote an album's worth of new material, rehearsed it (with his capable/affable band of comrades) and hit the road to record it for the first time, shows us he is one of us, needing to stretch his dollars as much as he can, find a new way to make and share music. And it shows his total confidence in his art.

My favorite songs here are Demons In Her Dancing Shoes (Backstreet Slide-ish), Big Sun Falling In The River (pop perfection), Stumble On (an obligatory RT mellow lost-love song in the vein of I Still Dream), Sidney Wells (a Johnny's Far Away sounding jig about a creepy killer, propelled by killer manic sopranino sax playing from Zorn), and If Love Whispers Your Name (yet another lost-love song....with an extended, intense, building guitar solo - classic RT!).

This isn't new ground musically, but for any Richard Thompson fan that's just fine.