Thompson decided to scale things back even further on his follow-up to The Old Kit Bag. This next record, Front Parlour Ballads, features almost entirely acoustic tracks performed almost entirely by a lone Richard Thompson in his home studio. While quieter, the album is still a powerful display of Thompson’s virtuosity. His lyrics are no softer either – the artist has by no means lost his flair for bleak themes and gallows humor. Rollicking opener “Let It Blow” tells the story of a doomed-from-the-gate marriage of a skirt-chasing celebrity to a flight attendant and is laced with acid lines like, “And they honeymooned down in Ibiza/ Where the sun and the nightlife were hot/ As she lay on the sand, he said, ‘Isn’t it grand? I bring all of my wives to this spot.'” While the lovely, lilting, mandolin-inflected waltz of “Miss Patsy” is actually pretty harrowing, with everything from charismatic radicals to cyanide pills, and resolves with the protagonist in a prison cell. Thompson vents his spleen for Northwest London suburbia on the “Tombstone Blues”-esque “A Solitary Life” and spews his vitriol at a loathsome, philandering sharpie on the sparse “Should I Betray?” And then the record closes with the chilling “When We Were Boys At School,” which tells the hopeless tale of a psychopath kid obsessed with Hitler and Satan who gets bullied, but grows up to have some actual social and political influence. All and sundry, the album veers between being a lot of fun to just being a lot. Still, it’s refreshing to see the veteran Thompson trying something relatively new at this point in his decades-spanning career.