Rumor & Sigh

hough Richard Thompson's cult following continued to revere the uniformly high-quality albums he released throughout the 1980s, by the end of that decade he was finding it difficult to find the wider audience his work with former wife Linda had once attracted. That changed at the start of the '90s with the career-revivifying RUMOR &
SIGH. Producer Mitchell Froom had been in Thompson's corner since the mid-'80s, but it was here that his modernist approach meshed fully with Thompson's folk-rock roots in a truly serendipitous way. Such traditional folk instruments as concertina and hurdy-gurdy share space with Froom's battery of keyboards, creating a new and exciting paradigm.
The songs themselves are largely unforgettable; the folky ballad "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", the poppy "Read About Love", and the moody, churning "Mystery Wind" are only a few of the many highlights on this album of varied and complex moods. Needless to say, several tracks feature Thompson letting loose some furious gutiar work in his patented
Bert Jansch-meets-Jerry Garcia style, a phenomenon on which his fervent admirers had come to rely.|