Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great art is often hard to access
Comment: It's great to hear RT rock out again. But he's a tough, often inaccesable artist. If you're not an RT fan, this may be a tough sell. If you are a RT afficiando, turn the volume up and enjoy!
I saw RT in DC as he sold this LP. He opened---as does this CD---with "Needle and Thread" and blasting volume. That's how the whole CD should be played. The old themes are here; The old instrumental tendencies are here. Great, energetic RT stuff.
Log on to NPR.org and look for the June 2006 DC show on the archives. He ended with "Wall of Death," "Feel So Good," and encored with "Tear-Stained Letter", but the bulk of the show was this bad boy. Listen to the concert/ Buy/download the CD.
Customer Rating:
Summary: my review
Comment: i've got a close freind who has been a long time fan...recently read an article in acoustic guitar about richard which piqued my interest further..this is a very well played`and musical cd..his lyricism reminds one of dylan but less obtuse(not to knock bob)...highly recommended
Customer Rating:
Summary: Loved this cd
Comment: Richard Thompson has crafted interesting lyrics and great tunes to go along with his always stellar guitar work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No cliche
Comment: I can only jump on board with the other raves. Absolutely inspired album. As a fan of every period of his career, I hear this album as one of his very best - after the honeymoon wears off, I'll know for sure. For now, I'm grooving on the crunch, the tenderness, the bitter, brutal hard-edges, the irony, the good old-fashioned rock-and-roll sea shanties, the sailing choruses and off-kilter chord progressions, the tight and fluid guitar solos, and a voice in as good shape as it has ever been. No reason not to order this - a totally satisfying, creative and mature album.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Comment: While another release from Richard Thompson is always received with great anticipation by these ears, Sweet Warrior is fairly hit-or-miss musically. I won't stoop to the tired cliche of saying it's only in comparison with Thompson himself -- okay, I will. The good news is that he has strapped on the electric guitar again after going all-acoustic in 2005's intimate and stripped-down Front Parlour Ballads. The "hits" are fine enough, but tend to lean to the musically self-derivative, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. What probably is a not-quite-so-good thing is that the playing of he and his band has become so polished and refined that the marvelous edginess that marked much of his previous work has been replaced with a near immaculateness, almost to the point of wearying the listener over the album's weighty 68-minute length -- a whopping fourteen songs in all. Even Thompson's buffed baritone seems less indignant and expressive than usual. Is this a product of age? Of over-rehearsal? Of a new producer? It's difficult to say without the foreknowledge of these "qualities" becoming hereafter common.
What certainly saves the album are many of the songs themselves; not only do they grow on one with repeat listening, but also seem to grow themselves! Such is the depth of their eloquence and power. Personal favorites include "Take Care the Road You Choose" and the concluding "Sunset Song", two ballads as fetching as he's ever done. "Mr. Stupid" and "Too Late To Come Fishing" are more generous helpings of Thompson's love-is-a-battlefield insights.
If there's an exception to the aforementioned less angry voice, it's manifested in "Dad's Gonna Kill Me", the "Dad" in this case being Baghdad -- a relentless, fear-drenched foreboding from the frontline with no front, a place where "nobody loves me here" and "I'm dead meat in my Humvee Frankenstein", where "it's someone else's mess that I didn't choose, at least we're winning on the Fox Evening News" -- probably the most pointed anti-war anthem I've yet heard on the current situation this side of Neil Young.
Still, after 2003's superlative The Old Kit Bag, this one only gets a B- overall...at best.
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