The first time I played ‘The Complete Guide To Insufficiency’ by David Thomas Broughton’ my initial thoughts centred around the word “shit”. Contradictory as I am, it’s the kind of reaction guaranteed to get me playing the CD again. Who wants average music in their life? Who gets excited about music that is ‘OK’? Who wants their music in easily digestible bite sized slices that fill a hole but not a heart?
So “shit” gets you played again. Because “shit” is a response that really says “I don’t understand this, what’s the point?” I confess that I still don’t understand the point to David and his music. But that is not important to this reappraisal other than the fact that this music is not shit, let alone pointless. It is different, at times difficult and it is foreign to me but it is something with which I want to reach an understanding. So David gets played again.
‘The Complete Guide…’ was recorded in one take in Wrangthorn Church Hall and aside from a small amount of studio intervention (mainly layering and looping), is given to the listener “warts and all”. The music is acoustic folk/blues played as a mantra. Each song takes a small clutch of musical ideas or motifs and cascades and perpetuates those ideas to make a bigger sound: from an acorn to a tree. The process is repeated on each of the five songs on the album.
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I like David’s voice. It is rich, purposeful and funereal and as old as the Yorkshire Dales. If David had lived in ancient Greece he would have been hired as a professional mourner. Probably. There is humour, pain, incisiveness and soul in his singing. And there is poetry in his words.
There is an ever-present atmosphere of hazy, unquantifiable surreality and an unsettled ambience that cannot be manufactured in a studio. At times it feels as if this music is coming to you from somewhere that is not of this time, like a lost piece of celtic music recently unearthed that upon hearing disturbs you by its uncanny relevance to the here and now.
A unique voice that will divide opinion: especially your own.
www.birdwar.com
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