David Thomas Broughton
The Complete Guide To Insufficiency

When I saw David Thomas Broughton live he played a brief set, no more than fifteen minutes long, plagued by a poor PA and a chattering, half-interested crowd. Increasingly frustrated at the unfavourable surroundings, he seemed to retreat into himself, shrouding his songs with ever-increasing layers of loops of guitar playing and hitting, eventually ending his appearance rocking with his head in his hands before walking off unannounced. That isn’t to make the twenty four year old singer/songwriter from Leeds seem petulant or, more to the point, any more maudlin than an artist with a debut album called The Complete Guide To Insufficiency may already be, but instead to relay a sense of what that album is all about. Certainly, when closing track 'Ever Rotating Sky' collapses in a sad, tangled mess of drums, loops and graceful harmonies, I think back to Thomas Broughton, absorbed in intensity after that gig.

Like the all the best folk music, themes of love and death are present on The Complete Guide To Insufficiency in equal, mutually inclusive measure. Indeed, the album was actually recorded in one take in the Wrangthorn Church in Leeds, and, as you’d expect, it creates a haunting effect: the sparse guitars, occasional drums and Broughton’s Antony Hegarty-esque voice finding their niche inside church walls in much the same way recording in a silo works so well for My Morning Jacket; it complements both the sound and the ethos behind it. Whereas the delicate finger-picking is in lieu of the leftfield instrumentals of John Fahey, the overall effect actually lies closer to **Ben Chasney’s Six Organs of Admittance: beauty with a dark undercurrent.