Action Packed: Best of the Capitol Years [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]_音乐专辑
Action Packed: Best of the Capitol Years [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]
表演者: Richard Thompson
介质: CD
发行时间: March 27, 2001
唱片数: 1
条形码: 0724353105129
专辑简介
Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years collects 22 performances by the English guitarist, songwriter and singer Richard Thompson during the period 1988-1999. It's a good collection, hitting most of the high points of Thompson's recordings during that portion of his career and throwing in a handful of rare performances beside.
Thompson first came into prominence in the late 1960s as a member of the folk-rock collective Fairport Convention, a group that took English and Celtic traditional music and rocked it out in a manner not unlike the way bands such as Cream and the Rolling Stones approached the American blues. After leaving that group in the early '70s, he focused on writing his own music and recorded a series of albums with his then-wife Linda. The best of these are masterpieces, full of haunting, painfully honest songs of heartache, pain, betrayal and the odd bit of black humor.
This collection focuses on music made a few years after the documented breakup of Thompson's marriage. If you had stopped me anywhere in the last couple of decades and asked me what I thought of Thompson's later solo recordings, I would have offered qualified praise. I would have said something to effect that Thompson, while still playing a fine guitar, had traded the fire that his lead playing displayed in his heyday with Fairport Convention for an admirable and concise lyricism and that his songwriting, while displaying a finely-honed sense of craft, lacked the emotional urgency of the confessional sort of material he presented on the records he recorded with his then-wife Linda in the '70's and early '80's. Listening to these songs now, though, I find myself reevaluating them. Actually, I would pretty much make the same assessment as above, only I would do it more generously. Listening afresh to this material, my respect for the level of craft he continues to bring to his songwriting has increased quite a bit. His guitar playing--well, I've always admired that.
Songs like "Waltzing's for Dreamers," "I Misunderstood," and "Keep Your Distance" and others compiled on Action Packed absolutely lack the emotional immediacy of classics like "Calvary Cross" or "Don't Renege On Our Love." So what? If Thompson wasn't the tortured artist in the 1990s that he was a decade earlier, I'm not going to fault him for that. Having endured a tumultuous period in his life, he writes with a survivor's perspective here and combines a good literary sense in his writing with catchy hooks that meld a pop sensibility with a mastery of generations of traditional music. The songs on, say, Shoot Out the Lights are the exorcism of a failed love affair, ripped from the diaries of Richard and Linda Thompson. Much of their power comes from the personal pain of the artists performing them. The songs in this collection, on the other hand, are tunes that anyone can sing. A couple of them are maybe a little overwrought--"I Feel So Good," for example, still strikes me as a too-clever rewrite of Larry Wallis's sublime and succinct "On Parole" from the first Motorhead album.
If you are interested in Richard Thompson, I still think the place to start is his albums with Fairport Convention, followed by the records he made with Linda, the most essential of which are I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights. Once you've digested that, Action Packed is a very good overview of the next phase of Thompson's career and perhaps the essential document of that era. Thompson diehards will also want this one for the bonus disc of live tracks (three in all) from the early 1990s.
曲目
1. Turning Of The Tide
2. Waltzing For Dreamers
3. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
4. I Misunderstood
5. I Feel So Good
6. Keep Your Distance
7. King Of Bohemia
8. I Can't Wake Up To Save My Life
9. Beeswing
10. The Ghost Of You Walks
11. Razor Dance
12. Cold Kisses
13. Bathsheba Smiles
14. Cooksferry Queen
15. Uninhabited Man
16. Walking The Long Miles Home
17. Persuasion
18. Mr. Rebound
19. Fully Qualified To Be Your Man
