Details
Track Listing
1. Read About Love
2. I Feel So Good
3. I Misunderstood
4. Grey Walls
5. You Dream Too Much
6. Why Must I Plead
7. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
8. Backlash Love Affair
9. Mystery Wind
10. Don't Sit on My Jimmy Shands
11. Keep Your Distance
12. Mother Knows Best
13. Gods Loves a Drunk
14. Psycho Street
Album Notes
Personnel: Richard Thompson (vocals, guitar, mandolin, hurdy-gurdy); Simon Nicol (guitar); Aly Bain (fiddle); Phillip Pickett (shawm, curtal, crumhorn); John Kirkpatrick (accordion, concertina); Mitchell Froom (piano, Hammond organ, portative organ, chamberlin, celeste, clavioline, echo harp);
Jerry Scheff (bass); Jim Keltner, Mickey Curry (drums); Alex Acuna (percussion); Clive Gregson, Christine Collister (background vocals).
Richard Thompson's albums with Mitchell Froom in the producer's chair tended to be stylistically varied affairs, and on RUMOR AND SIGH, the singer's distinctive English vocal inflections and biting guitar spar inspiringly with Froom's kitchen-sink approach to production. Froom found intriguing ways to cope with Thompson's own wild stylistic approach, ranging from dark, narrative acoustic ballads ("1952 Vincent Black Lightning"), through radio-friendly, country-tinged rock ("Keep Your Distance," "You Dream Too Much"), to demonic rock & rollers ("I Feel So Good," "Mother Knows Best'). SIGH also showcases Thompson's lyrical extremes, from the intense ("I Misunderstood," "Mystery Wind") to the daffy ("Don't Sit On My Jimmy Shands," "Psycho Street").
Though Richard Thompson's cult following continued to revere the
uniformly high-quality albums he released throughout the 1980s, by the
end of that decade he was finding it difficult to find the wider
audience his work with former wife Linda had once attracted. That
changed at the start of the '90s with the career-revivifying RUMOR &
SIGH. Producer Mitchell Froom had been in Thompson's corner since the mid-'80s, but it was here that his modernist approach meshed fully with Thompson's folk-rock roots in a truly serendipitous way. Such
traditional folk instruments as concertina and hurdy-gurdy share space
with Froom's battery of keyboards, creating a new and exciting paradigm.
The songs themselves are largely unforgettable; the folky ballad "1952
Vincent Black Lightning," the poppy "Read About Love," and the moody,
churning "Mystery Wind" are only a few of the many highlights on this
album of varied and complex moods. Needless to say, several tracks
feature Thompson letting loose some furious gutiar work in his patented
Bert Jansch-meets-Jerry Garcia style, a phenomenon on which his fervent admirers had come to rely.
Industry Reviews
4 Stars - Excellent - One of Q Magazine's 50 best albums of 1991.
Q (06/01/1991)
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