The man dreams of Dave Grohl tied up in chains and laughs like Vincent Price. Not the most promising of introductions but what it looks like on the surface is a poor indication of the lop-sided beauty of North Dakota’s Tom Brosseau and his new album, ‘Posthumous Success’.
It might look wonky, it might sound wonky and it may be suffering from the kind of anxiety disorders more commonly associated with people handing out copies of ‘Big Issue’ but it has a fun and sprawling symmetry all of its own.
Take lead-up track, ‘Favourite Colour Blue’. A solitary - and what sounds like - very battered guitar pursuing a desultory and unfocused route into a verse produced on the fly and carried by a voice that sounds like its just arrived out of the wilderness. It’s not busking exactly, but it has that same slightly inexpert, impromptu, hand-to-mouth quality; the album’s sparse, slightly woody texture often chafing with the guest musicians’ serial attempts to add polish and cohesion (although the supple rubber grooves of tracks like ‘New Heights’ suggest the guests occasionally get their way).
The scuzzy, lo-fi scribblings of ‘You Don’t Know My Friends’ recalls a growling, hot-wired motor and the skewed, fuzzy-logic of slacker royalty like Pavement, whilst more breezy and freewheeling instrumentals like ‘Boothill’ and ‘Miss Lucy’ bring to mind the gentle country vignettes of Richmond Fontaine’s ‘Thirteen Cities’. It’s the sound of the author stripping things to the bone, of river rafts and the light of the moon. Less Proust and more Tom Sawyer. Everything is either caving in or up in the air, combining to form beautifully illustrated tales of North American life experienced by some quietly sophisticated hick from the valley. Victories and losses are written in the scars on his arm and sins are anxiously (yet rather cheerfully) confessed. It’s the sound of a man making up for his continuing lack of insight and understanding into the sharp, shocking vicissitudes of fortune by responding intuitively to changes that occur – whether it’s the unaccountable presence of rocks in his boots, a sudden impulse to charge down to Reno or the unexpected clatter of his guitar hitting the mic-stand whilst recording. Running around in circles and highly strung – but with a happy face.
Fabulously loony trailer-trash.
TOM BROSSEAU ~ 'POSTHUMOUS SUCCESS' review by Crud Magazine, released, 11.05.09 
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