Recorded amidst a period of intense personal and professional turmoil, the final Richard and Linda Thompson album is a wrenching document of fraying domesticity and dashed artistic dreams. Dropped from their label, Chrysalis, following the lukewarm response to 1979’s Sunnyvista, the ensuing two years had been endlessly trying for the couple. By the time Shoot Out The Lights was released in 1982, their marriage and creative partnership was functionally over, a fact that made the ensuing, contractually obligated support tour close to unbearable. Even given this fraught context, the temptation to characterize Shoot Out The Lights as a typical “divorce album” is reductive and diminishing. Rather then an intimate portrait of one couple’s experience, the record is more like a triptych of entropy — the existential nightmares of such key tracks as “Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed?” and “Wall Of Death” amounting to something bigger than the hill of beans that is two people’s problems. Far from feeling defeated, the music here is by and large an exposed nerve of energized longing — angry, frightened, and contrite in equal measures. The jaunty desperation of “A Man In Need” and the rollicking, vaguely threatening “Don’t Renege On Our Love” are frenetic articles of dead-letter devotion, haltingly suggesting a way forward for the partnership. Only on the brooding title track’s dissonant, epic guitar outro do we fully recognize the marriage’s lost cause, spoken through Thompson’s instrument in a manner that his potent words can’t quite bring themselves to express.