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Review: 'BROUGHTON, DAVID THOMAS'
'Crippling Lack Volumes 1 - 3'   

-  Label: 'Song, By Toad / LeNoizeMaker / Paper Garden'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '4th April, 2nd May & 6th June 2016'

Our Rating:
It's fair to say that David Thomas Broughton from Otley, West Yorkshire is of man of contradictions.

On one hand he is a simple, if offbeat, folk singer but on the other hand he's an indefinable conundrum. Not for nothing is a recent documentary film about him entitled 'The Ambiguity of David Thomas Broughton'.

His songs are by turns delicate, dense, disarmingly honest and preposterously obscure. He could have a day job as a hip priest delivering sermons to a sceptical congregation or else you could easily imagine him as a self-defined soap box orator. Either way, you get the sense that he's happy when people stop to listen to him but is not unduly concerned if they choose to wander off bemused or confused. He is forever out on a limb and perfectly content to be there.

Crippling Lack is his most sprawling and most defiantly eccentric project to date. It is knowingly directed towards a marginal target audience who still buy vinyl discs, still sit patiently to listen and are not merely looking for music to soundtrack their lifestyle choices.

Broughton's songs could be read as heartbreakingly sad tales of isolation and alienation or else as humorous advice on how to retain one's sanity in a world where logic and humanity are in woefully short supply. The "blanket sorrow" he sings of on Silent Arrow could therefore either be a object of comfort or denote an overwhelming wave of despondency.

The three volumes span one hour and forty minutes over twelve tracks and were recorded while Broughton was living in Pyongyang, North Korea. Edinburgh's Song, By Toad Records provide the stabilizing centre but each volume on a separate label and released in different countries - Scotland, France and the USA.

Shorter tracks are counter balanced by extended pieces that reach a peak with the 16 minutes, 18 seconds of I Close My Eyes, a song that concludes with a hypnotic manta "I close my eyes and it all goes wrong" that slowly becomes consumed by noise.

The delay pedal is made for artists like Broughton, allowing him to loop on a whim and accompany himself at length on acoustic guitar when the mood takes him. He does not really need collaborators but kindred spirits are drawn to him all the same.

If you are the type who judges a man by the company he keeps then you ought to be impressed by the fact that Beth Orton, Aidan Moffat, Sam Amidon and artist Luke Drozd all make cameo appearances here.

Broughton pursues a wilfully unorthodox path yet is never arty for artiness' sake. His lyrics are the opposite of vernacular, often using pseudo literary language as with a line such as "I struggle with the concept that you spread on our conversation" from Concrete Statement.

Such wordplay leaves the listener with the impression that, even when speaking of everyday matters, Broughton is communicating at a deeper level and that he is concerned with nuances and subtexts rather than superficialities.

At the same time, he seems aware of the dangers of appearing overly aloof and so will go out of his way to deflect accusations of being locked within some ivory tower. This would explain why, in Words Of Art, Broughton chooses to deploy the plain speaking Aidan Moffat to counter the singer's claim that his words are from the heart; "They are merely words of art, not the whole fucking truth" snarls Moffat.
   
Broughton is in his element whether taking the moral high ground or itemising the mundane details of ordinary lives. Whatever the 'crippling lack' of the title refers to it is most certainly not creativity or originality. It captures an artist at the peak of his powers doing what he does best, ambiguously.

David Thomas Broughton's website
  author: Martin Raybould

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BROUGHTON, DAVID THOMAS - Crippling Lack Volumes 1 - 3