Daring Adventures

Say what you like about the influence producer Mitchell From had on Richard Thompson’s sound — on Daring Adventures (the first of their five albums together) Thompson sounds like a man unleashed. Whether he’s criticizing a woman for her punky fashion sense (“A Bone Through Her Nose”) or using train design as a metaphor for existential anxiety (“Dead Man’s Handle”) or using the death of a great music-hall singer to illuminate the fate of a whole generation of English soldiers (“Al Bowlly’s in Heaven”), he writes and sings with acute and often painful insight, and he plays like the devil is chasing him.