Tom Brosseau: Posthumous Success (CD on Fat Cat Records)

Band: Tom Brosseau
Label: Fat Cat Records
Title: Posthumous Success

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Band:Tom Brosseau
Title:Posthumous Success
Reviewed By:Sarah Maybank
Date Published:08/05/2009

Label:Fat Cat Records
Format:CD
Release Year:Label
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Acoustic guitar-toting, North Dakota native Tom Brosseau has an unassuming demeanour, a bit of a girl’s voice, and an olde worlde-style website done up in the style of your granny’s parlour – if she had been your granny way back in, say, 1900. The kind of lily-livered credentials, then, to have baying crowds screaming, "Throw him to the James Blunt fans."

However, A-list patronage from John Parish and PJ Harvey (Parish produced the album, Brosseau’s about to support Parish and Peej on tour) mean we should be expecting something more meaty than Blunt’s sausage factory of warbling pseudo-emotion. And we’d be right.

As wry as the self-mocking title suggests, ‘Posthumous Success’ is a 12-strong set of stories gently spun over scuffed-up percussion and sparingly plucked guitars. But the thing that probably captivated Harvey and Parish is Brosseau’s playful knack of subverting his own wide-eyed troubadour image.

His influences are all over the place – and many of them nowhere near the ‘acoustica’ section. There must be some Nine Inch Nails lurking in his record collection, if the industrial noise clanging atonally in the background of ‘You Don’t Know’ is anything to go by, while ‘Drum Roll’, all about stage star Miss Lucy getting ready to step into the spotlight, evokes Lou Reed’s sneery, street-savvy delivery, if a lot lighter on the sleaze. ‘Boot Hill’, meanwhile, consists of little more than ambient noise, some female oooh-ooohs and a twanging jew’s harp.

There’s nothing new in lacing a genre as old as the hills and as familiar and comfy as a pair of well-worn shoes with a grab-bag of modern flourishes – hello Beck. But it takes a deft touch to stop it sounding like a pig’s ear. A big hand, then, to Mr Posthumous Success.

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