"He's from Otley near Leeds." This is the text in the "about me" section of folksinger David Thomas Broughton's Facebook page, where he is listed as a "local business." Above it is a picture of Broughton looking very startled. The photo and the line make me laugh and, occasionally, so does Broughton's music, which mixes spare, matter-of-fact playing with a dry sense of humor and a self-effacing willingness to improvise.
Take a line like, "In the main all that I can glean is that this is the reason that this world is fucked," from Outbreeding's "Electricity". Prim syntax and barstool frustration collide in a rich baritone. Broughton pronounces "fucked" fooked, and the humor lies in the fact that he sings it as though it weren't funny. Thirty seconds later, the song devolves into unexpectedly dissonant keyboards and snippets of prerecorded talking.
Outbreeding is the most band-oriented record he's released. (For comparison, he recorded 2005's The Complete Guide to Insufficiency alone in a church with the help of looping pedals.) He's said in interviews that he has a greater interest in trying new ideas than rehashing old ones, which is an attitude I admire in artists, especially when they can carry it off and sound curious instead of prickish.
Broughton's voice is distinctive enough to anchor each track, but Outbreeding feels like it lacks a central character or thread. Some songs lean toward driving, structured folk-pop; some are lumbering and discordant. I like the comparatively poppy ones, but mostly because they showcase an intelligent juxtaposition of brisk, twinkly music with Broughton's natural melancholy. (I still love the chant-like atmosphere of The Complete Guide to Insufficiency, but the more downbeat tracks here don't have the same grace).
Broughton's ideas are still worth hearing though, and his voice works for me (even though it might be feast-or-famine for other listeners). Like the folksinger Sam Amidon, his music sometimes feels indebted to a rustic, pre-Dylan past but is buoyed by a mischievous personality-- he takes something that sounds pat at first and turns it into something skewed and unusual. And like Amidon, Broughton's live shows are miniature spectacles: He roams through the crowd and uses furniture as percussion. He layers sounds in slightly haphazard ways, as though his songs weren't so holy that he couldn't subject them to chance.
That kind of loose imagination and playfulness is not only hard to capture on record, it's probably impossible. The moment dissolves by nature, whereas recorded music wants to stick around forever. Broughton-- like Amidon-- will always be one of those artists probably better seen than heard, though somehow I imagine that doesn't bother him. Even on its less interesting tracks, there's something about Outbreeding that feels warm and content, like it was glad to be made.
