Still

Put them all together and you've got a drink that goes down hard, with a potent bittersweetness distilled by a master. [No. 122, p.60]

Everything you want from Richard Thompson is right here, right now, on Still. You wont notice Jeff Tweedy all that much, which is as big a compliment as one can make of any producer.

A typically finely crafted slice of emotionally raw storytelling with an absolute peach if a guitar solo. [Aug 2015, p.93]

Always good for a spirited rock song, he infuses Patty Don't You Put Me Down with narrative wit and charge that recalls contemporary Bob Dylan. We're all lucky that Thompson is on fire these days.

Newly recruited producer Jeff Tweedy brings fresh textures to a mix of bluesy rock, delicate acoustica and skirling electric folk, but mostly he stands back and lets a master do his stuff.

The set starts with a slow, sturdy ballad of hope and change, She Never Could Resist a Winding Road, then settles into stories of pained love and sexual frustration that will, I suspect, sound even better live. The best is left for last.

With Still, Richard Thompson fans can rejoice in knowing all the aspects of his exemplary talents remain intact.

The musicianship is so uniformly good that you forget about it and allow yourself to be swept onward by the songs.

Tweedy keeps up an unobtrusive presence throughout, letting Thompson play to his strengths, and it all results in another reliably consistent album.

The news (good or bad) is that Tweedy helped Thompson make just the sort of album that's made him one of our greatest legacy artists, and it's an example of why Thompson is still worth hearing 43 years into a career that shows no signs of stopping.

Tightly wound--easygoing but uptight; the work of a man still striving for a modest kind of perfection. And--not for the first time--with Still he has almost achieved it. [Jul 2015, p.65]

The best moments here find Thompson more restrained, particularly the sinuous, fingerpicked beauty of Beatnik Walking and the rueful, all-acoustic Josephine.

No, this is not his strongest work to date, but it certainly keeps him in the conversation.

One clunker on an album full of gems doesn't drag everything else down, though, and Thompson deserves all our respect--he's been through the major-label wringer, found his place where he can be celebrated as he deserves among his independent fans, and is still making complicated, thoughtful, intricate, resonant music on his own terms many decades deep into his career.

Thompson's new album arrives as another example of how a mature artist can continue to innovate.

Still, even with the expected flaws of latter day Thompson releases, continues the winning streak of his last two albums of new music.

Whilst Still could certainly have benefitted from a greater cache of stronger songs (a couple of which could have been swapped-in from the largely electric self-produced Variations EP that comes with early CD editions), as a combined entity it holds together convincingly as an amiable summary of what latter-day Richard Thompson is all about.

With the help of producer Jeff Tweedy, Thompson knows that bitterness goes down easiest when paired with autumnal Celtic-pub melodies (see "Josephine," which evokes his time in Fairport Convention).

Still is Thompson through and through.

Rewarding, yet keep it familiar at the same time.