Richard Thompson Sweet Warrior

The wheel is a fine invention. As long as you build it to the proper circular specifications it will reliably roll down the hill. Essentially, there is no need to reinvent it. Richard Thompson makes a good wheel. A devotee of traditional forms, he has long since perfected a style of writing and playing that relies heavily on an amalgam of English folk and American blues, and since his recent exploration into 1000 years of song revealed a common thread between "Sumer Is Icumen In" and "Oops, I Did It Again", I guess he figures that if the formula has lasted a millennium, there must be something to it.

So, as usual, Thompson is not out to surprise anybody on his new one, Sweet Warrior. It contains a healthy mix of grade A, high quality folk/blues with a smattering of brilliance here and there and spectacular guitar playing throughout. I'm a guitar player, so I can understand if the average Joe is not sitting there in awe of this man's sound and style, whereas I can keep coming back to almost any one of these tunes for a knockout experience. But great fretwork doesn't always make for a great album, as any number of posthumous Hendrix releases prove. You need great songs, and this album has a few. The opener, Needle and Thread, is a classic Thompson groove on top of a classic Thompson, heart thrown on the floor and stomped on lyric. His use of archaic turns of phrase like "hand me down my needle and thread" coupled with an almost Celtic guitar riff and a driving blues chug, give songs like this a timeless quality. They seem to exist out of time and for all time. Likewise, Take Care The Road You Choose has Thompson snaking his vocal around a simple major chord progression, with mournful slide guitar lines adding commentary. It's the kind of tune he might have recorded 20 years ago or will record 20 years on, losing none of its power. His connection to the past is solidified by subtle additions to guitar phrases or lyrics. In Too Late to Come Fishing he sings "it's too late, the fish don't like your bait", recalling the line from Henry Thomas' classic Fishin' Blues, "many fish bites if you got good bait".

I should point out that few highlight Thompson's skill as a vocalist, and while he does not have an operatic tenor, he gives his all to each and every performance. He's trying to sell everything here and the listener appreciates the effort. This is par for the course for Thompson, but maybe he's a little more committed this time due to the Bush/Blair fiasco he can't help commenting on, directly and indirectly. When he laments "everything is poppy red" about a lost lover, it brings forth images of a bloody battlefield, and "Johnny's Far Away", with its Clancy Brothers passion, can't help but bring to mind the soldiers off in a foreign land. Dad's Gonna Kill Me faces the issue head on, the title offering a clever irony. Basically, the sad or angry songs match the rollicking ones blow for blow (hell, sometimes they're the same song), even when the lyrics betray the sadness of the music, as in She Sang Angels to Rest.

But lest one think this album is a dour affair, let me disavow you of that notion. The exuberance, the presence of life is such that even the downers are uplifting. Sweet Warrior is another highlight in a career that's had enough of them already. And it proves once again that originality is overrated, especially in relation to good old fashioned consistency.