OK. Dream Attic? A new experience for me.
Seriously. Normally — as a Richard Thompson fan since his Fairport Convention days – the progression is straightforward, and goes like this:
1 . Get word of new album being released.
2. Dance with impatience until release date.
3. Snatch up shiny new copy and head home, clutching album and mumbling to self.
4. Listen to album.
5. Get naked and roll around in the music.
6. Get up, drooly and incoherent, and write about it.
Dream Attic required a different progression, a different road in. This is the first time I got to hear an entire album end to end, played live with the full band, months before the CD hit the street. This one, I had to approach sideways. How often does an artist release a live CD that contains only new material?
This is not the easiest Thompson release to get up close to, and rub against. There’s a level of damn, this feels personal, that had me wanting to find someone and ask if it was okay to parse a line here, a song there. It wasn’t so much an uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism as a sense of old-fashioned formality: the boy asking the girl’s father for permission before asking her out.
So, not one of the easiest ones to get next to. It is, however, one of the best. Dream Attic is a bloody wonder, and it’s nice to see that the Grammy folks agree with me on this one, because it’s been nominated for Best Contemporary Folk Album this year. Sweet Warrior should have not only got a nomination, it should have walked with the award. I’m rather hoping Dream Attic does.
I’m not going to break it down for you, on a song-by-song level. The thing about this one is that Thompson moves up and down the scale, feeling to feeling, anger to contempt to tenderness to righteousness vindictiveness to regret, on a level of virtuoso strength that’s so potent, it’s mindboggling. From the “bend over, spread ‘em, we’ll send a bill for the lube we’re not using, but TRUST us!” anger of the “The Money Shuffle” (Thompson’s take on what Wall Street and its pals have done to the rest of us) to the aching regretful distance of “A Brother Slips Away” and “If Love Whispers Your Name”, we’re set down in our chairs and our chins grabbed hard and turned towards the light, or in this instance towards the speakers. Believe me, children, you’re going to pay attention because you can’t not.
The lineup is the one Thompson fans have got used to these past few years: Michael Jerome on drums, Taras Prodaniak on bass, and the incomparable Pete Zorn on damned near everything else. Musically, though, this new lineup’s got something I didn’t know I’d been jonesing for: a fiddle. And holy mama, the one small thing, that taste of Fairport past, doesn’t so much add a level as it does push the roof off. The man providing the fiddle on this one, Joel Zifkin, has my undying gratitude. He’s completely brilliant, and fills out an empty place to satisfying perfection.
I can’t name a weak spot in the set list, either. Of course, every album is going to provide ultimate favourites, and this one’s no different – it’s just that, on Dream Attic, it’s damned near the entire thing. I’ve got a guilty weakness for “Here Comes Geordie”, which is about as contemptuous as a lyric gets, and which left me feeling glad I hadn’t pissed Thompson off enough to write that about me. Gun to head, I’ll admit that “Sidney Wells”, Thompson’s terrifyingly boisterous song about a serial killer who sounds rather like the Yorkshire Ripper with Saucy Jack’s charm, is the one that’s just slightly over the top for me, the one that leaves me a little drunker and more staggery than even the rest. I found myself humming it, and then realised I was jumping back and forth between two songs: “Sidney Wells” and the 19th century “Rocky Road to Dublin”. Trust me on this one: I love the original. I did a certain amount of hanging out with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem when I was an adolescent, and heard it sung by the best. But Thompson — by dint of a bardic lyric so horrifying, it almost makes you laugh in self-defense — literally kicks the legs out from under the original, and kicks out the jams in the process.
But the whole CD is a monster. Seriously. Go and get it, put it on, settle in to your chair — and for the love of who or whatever, don’t forget to strap yourself in. With Dream Attic, Thompson is dragging you, screaming and kicking, down an unknown road. And the ride gets bumpy, in the best way possible.
(Shout! Factory, 2010)
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