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.
Minus that deceptively unaffected voice, a song like "Big Time" might come across as bluster. Instead, anchored by Brosseau's nuanced delivery it feels oddly innocent, even bittersweet. Similarly, in "Been True", Brosseau's voice vies with trebly interlocking guitars, the tone vacillating between melancholy and hopeful. Even the cacophony of "You Don't Know My Friends" is oddly hushed and muffled, subverting the album's obvious Big Rock Moment into something stranger and more unpredictable. "Axe & Stump", with its oblique Afro-pop nods, and the just shy of straightforward "Wishbone Medallion" find some intriguing ways to twist themselves in and out of knots, too. Keeping the record further off-kilter, Brosseau scatters several not insignificant instrumental tracks throughout. They range from the wistful ("Boothill") to the wide-eyed ("Miss Lucy") to the more abstract ("Youth Decay" and "Chandler"), yet even without vocals they impressively adhere to Brosseau's style.
Yet were one to still suspect, even for a second, that Brosseau is widening his scope simply in search of wider success, he also offers an explicit reminder of how malleable a talent he remains by starting and finishing the album with the same song, albeit in very different forms. The first version of "Favorite Color Blue" is austere and acoustic folk, in the mode of Brosseau's earlier work. The second, however, is full of pulsing synths and further embellishments, not so much a remix as a re-imagining. By book-ending Posthumous Success with these two dissimilar yet equally effective and affecting takes on the same song, Brosseau is keeping us on our toes. Is the latter a tease of a future direction he plans to take, or a sly concession to the stylistic temptations he's thus far largely resisted?
"I'm slowly changing my style," he sings. "I got new shoes and now all I want to do is dance a while." Time will tell, but listening to Brosseau finding his footing at least makes the mystery more compelling.
