***Uncorking the well of wit, whimsy and cool, refined fury that’s fueled his path around this world, Mayo Thompson pours out a new round: a first ever album of solo guitar music, not to mention a first solo album in almost forever, Quiet Days in Cliché.With The Red Krayola, Mayo made three albums of pop music in the late 1960s, taking the idea of rock ‘n roll songs farther into the hoped-for realms of possibility than 98% of their psychedelic brethren before or since. Following the demise of the band, Mayo produced his first solo album, Corky’s Debt to His Father in 1970. It found the underground godfather-to-be looking backwards at his roots, with a great bunch of songs caravaning across the resident milieus, musical and otherwise, of his youth. Barely distributed in its day, Corky’s Debt to His Father has become a classic. Mayo continues to ply available trade routes, wherever they did and do currently run, to sail on.Fifty-six years later, Quiet Days In Cliché is Mayo’s second solo album. The music is improvised and probably can’t be repeated as played. These pieces are ‘notes to self’, but we heard them and we liked them—so here they are.
LP $22.75
12/04/2026
***After Math retails what becomes of the cast of characters introduced in Art, Mystery, joint and severally pursuing an erotic Rinascimento statuette attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo, a pursuit that lands them in court. On the way, their collective and singular fates are unfolded and accounted for, the consequences of the truth of matters for them are brought to bear and a kind of rough justice is seen to have been done, as is appropriate in rough trade. “After Math begins where Art, Mystery, the first installment in Mr. Thompson’s two-part novel, left off. The chrome trader Perlat Tile has just witnessed the criminal Pablo Palbon attempt to smuggle a small erotic bronze by Pollaiuolo out of Tirana disguised as a funeral urn. The ensuing trial—described in After Math—pits the gallerist Ms. Jasmine, who wants to acquire the work legitimately, against the state of Albania, which also claims ownership of it. Written in the impeccable prose that we have come to expect from Mr. Thompson, After Math proves that what happens after a plot is foiled can be just as delightful as the action itself.”—Michael Sanchez
BK $29.85
09/01/2023
***In Art, Mystery, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission from an odd source, the very man who brought him down, a former football referee turned art handler—to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art. (STREET DATE - 1/26/2018) “Perlat Tile, Pablo Pablon, Ms. Jasmine, and the Beast of Bern tussle and conspire with other assorted gangsters and PhDs over an illicit Pollaiuolo statuette. The action unfolds in Tirana, between the National Museum and a bar named Tiranosaurus Tex, leading to a denouement in Venice. Mr. Thompson has given us the perfect cocktail of suspense and whimsy. Very highly recommended—even the most humorless of art historians will be tickled by Art, Mystery!”—Dr. Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen “I am impressed with Art, Mystery. Cracking dialogue. I enjoyed reading it. I also thought it was very funny and wore its humour integrally, I mean, like, subtle.”—Josephine Pryde About the author: Art, Mystery is Mayo Thompson’s first published work of fiction since the nineteen-sixties. He is best known for his work with the psychedelic band, The Red Krayola
BK $30.85
01/26/2018