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06/21/09 North Park Vaudeville San Diego, CA
Discography
06/23/09 KEXP.org Seattle, WA 06/24/09 Tractor Tavern Seattle, WA 06/25/09 Mississippi Studio Portland, OR 06/26/09 Downtown Eatery Redding, CA 06/27/09 Sophia’s Thai Lounge Davis, CA 06/28/09 Cafe du Nord San Francisco, CA 06/29/09 The Crepe Place Santa Cruz, CA
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Tom Brosseau – Posthumous Success
At first listen, I assumed Tom Brosseau to be a man in his 20s with a small cardigan and chin-length bob. You know, something like this. Boy was I surprised when I visited his website to discover absolutely zero truth to my theory! In reality, Brosseau is a man of cheekbones and sun-kissed locks; he could be a Swede, an art historian, or someone who drinks a lot of red wine whilst perusing the New Yorker. His presentation is modest—attractive-yet-visually idiosyncratic—like someone who toes the cusp of modern and the quietly aged. It’s the voice that’s deceiving, not the man.
The voice is interesting. I say this with minimal scorn. In fact, I like the voice. The nasal lilt suits Posthumous Success, an affable little oddity that alternates between wobbly vocals and jazzy freak-folk-on-Schnapps instrumentation. While a straightforward acoustic version of “Favourite Colour Blue” opens the album, the subsequent songs are trickier to tag. Is Posthumous rooted in any particular genre? I’d hazard a guess that Brosseau is less concerned with uniformity as he is with exploration. “You Don’t Know My Friends” recalls the Elephant 6 full-bodied noise wash, while “Wishbone Medallion” is a clever, mildly creepy, ode to a sexy stranger, as only a poetic observer could phrase (“I want to take her to Reno, in a stolen El Camino, as the sun dies”). In a way, Posthumous plays like a vanity project—keen attention to aesthetic detail, reason be damned. This is especially obvious on Brosseau’s instrumental tracks: “Youth Decay” is stark, rather noir, and ridiculously perfect for a film student’s senior thesis (something involving bay windows and half-smoked Gauloises); “Miss Lucy” is buoyant, like a Technicolor 60s sitcom or a giant spray of balloons; “Chandler” once more suggests bleak romanticism by way of melodrama. Considering that Posthumous is a single entity, these instrumental components read like “act breaks,” brief pauses for contemplation and rehydration.
But this is the Age of the MP3. Download resources have made it virtually impossible for musicians to control the way a fan listens to an album. With empires like iTunes offering customers the option of “picking and choosing,” instrumental fillers become archaic and, in a sad way, gratuitous. Neither “Youth Decay” nor “Chandler” is wholly satisfying as a stand alone track, but Brosseau probably never intended for them to be. Contemporary songwriters are forced into painful consciousness when it comes to album arrangement; the act of separating a group of songs that were clearly designed to flow seamlessly is like giving a supporting actor his own spin-off role: awkward and second-rate. For this reason alone, I urge our readers to consider Posthumous as a beloved ensemble cast and buy (or listen illegally (just kidding.)) the album as a whole. It’s too lovely a production to bastardize with shuffle technology.
Posthumous Success is Brosseau’s eighth release and will hit the American market on June 23. Visit Amazon.com to pre-order the album. For more information, check out his official website or Myspace. Brosseau is currently on tour.
06/20/2009 22:58:22 ♥ lara (
/lara206.vox.com) ♥ tombrosseau.com ♥ myspace.com/tombrosseau
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