Send "Tom Brosseau " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Tom Brosseau's back story may be straight out of the Dust Bowl era-- North Dakota troubadour strikes out from his home town of Grand Forks to find his fame and fortune following the devastating floods of 1997-- but back stories can be deceiving. In fact, Brosseau's proven himself hip and adventurous enough to effortlessly hob-knob with L.A.'s elite, equally imbued as he is by Woody Guthrie's folk wanderlust, Cole Porter's cosmopolitan class, and even Jeff Buckley's arty otherworldliness. Indeed, Brosseau's the sort of artist whose simple, strikingly unadorned songs and high, lonesome vocals could probably be fit to shape if not any occasion than certainly any time and place.Still, one gets the sense Brosseau may have nonetheless played his true nature close to the vest. Albums like What I Mean to Say Is Goodbye and Cavalier feature their share of tasteful musical flourishes, but by and large those discs remain spare, almost skeletal in their execution, as if Brosseau were still waiting for the right body to hang on those bones. Posthumous Success (which takes its name from a chapter of a Camus bio but its self-deprecating wit from The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt) isn't quite the coming-out party it's being presented as, but it does find Brosseau expanding his sonic palette while retaining the lyrical (both literal and figurative) qualities that have made him a quietly special performer and singer. He's the type of guy who can casually reference Dave Grohl, Vincent Price, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood protagonist Hazel Motes without waving the red flag of pretension, let alone breaking the slightly surreal, waking-dream quality of the music he's so carefully fostered....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| Tom Brosseau's last effort, Cavalier, was about as spare as album's get. It was mostly his voice right up front in the mix with his guitar lilting somewhere in the background. But fans looking for another hushed offering on Posthumous Success are in for quite a surprise. These songs are much bigger and richer than his previous effort, as Brosseau employs a number of guest musicians to help fill his songs out. He also recorded the album on both coasts, resulting in a variety of sounds. And if the sonic breadth of the album isn't surprising enough, the influences Brosseau claims for the album are equally all over the map. They range from Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor to Dylan's Time Out of Mind and the soundtrack to The Natural to polar ice caps and the oil derricks of western North Dakota. Tom Brosseau absorbs all these strange muses and new sounds and filters them through the unassuming quiver of his voice. The singer has always made filling meals of spare scraps on his records, so it should be interesting to see what he does now that he's heaping servings onto our plates....full text |
| 2-4-7-music |
| 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....full text |
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