Front Parlour Ballads
- Richard Thompson
- Band Name: Richard Thompson
- Record Label: Cooking Vinyl
- Release Date: Aug 9, 2005
- Critic Score
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100May just be the most concise and potent distillation of Thompson's art to date. [Album of the Month, Sep 2005, p.98]
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Front Parlor Ballads is built from modest stuff, but the finished product is as strong as anything Thompson has recorded in the past ten years.
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80Less has become more for Richard Thompson. [Sep 2005, p.96]
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80Recording at home suits him. Even with the over-dubs, this set has the vitality of a live performance, and he clearly feels relaxed enough to take chances with the sometimes elaborate songs, delivering both the expected guitar skills and some fluid, difficult vocals.
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80While lyrically his songs are top-drawer, Thompson's guitar prowess is also noteworthy. [13 Aug 2005]
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80Even when he turns down the volume, he never tones down the creative intensity.
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77Front Parlour Ballads offers the traditional Thompson mix of lush folk beauty and cruel knife-twisting lyrics.
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70Song after song, this is hardly an album that boasts of its riches but, in a determinedly low-key fashion, the music asserts itself in honest textures captured in naked performance.
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70Mostly the results are pleasingly wry and wise. [Sep 2005, p.118]
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A few tracks feel forced... but the majority have the effortless sound of a master who's been at it for four decades. [11 Aug 2005, p.70]
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70While this may not be the best place to start investigating the man, it's still another reliably wonderful chapter in the life of one of the country's best songwriters.
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70The surprise here is that Thompson has been able to create such a crackerjack of an album from such sparse and dark materials.
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Bogs down in stillborn ballads, vague metaphors, and fusty arrangements that sound too Olde English, even for him.
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But cliché is not the only thing that mars “Thames” and other tunes... It’s the lethargy of the tempos, the navel-gazing compositional complexity, the empty flashiness of the acoustic-guitar runs and over-enunciated words.
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This album is difficult, complicated, pretentious, infuriating, inconsistent, and asks more questions then it answers.
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Perhaps he needs the pressure or the camaraderie. Perhaps not. But for some reason, Thompson sounds detached from the songs on Front Parlour Ballads, even though he's in the thick of them.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 4 out of 5
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Mixed: 1 out of 5
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Negative: 0 out of 5
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martinb9Usual RT mix of wry lyrics, dark ideas and superb playing.
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wx5
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Sordel7Adventurous but, for this artist, underwhelming