Review: Tom Brosseau - Perfect Abandon
By Garrett Bower, Copy Editor
[Crossbill Records; 2015]
Rating: 2.5/5
Key Tracks: “Roll Along with Me,” “Tell Me Lord”
With the advent of the Internet and the Information Age, it’s tough to imagine the vagabond lifestyles of generations past, the kind of living that was immortalized in song instead of Tweets. With Perfect Abandon, American folk artist Tom Brosseau aims to recapture some of that quaint whimsy.
Born in South Dakota, Brosseau demonstrates a great deal of Midwestern influence on Perfect Abandon, with sparse instrumentals that usually take a backseat to measured narratives. He also goes the way of his folk betters with a preference toward storytelling and wordplay.
In the most obvious use of this vocal-emphasized folk technique, the LP opens with “Hard Luck Boy.” The song features Brosseau’s raw, mostly spoken-word voice directly at the forefront with only clean acoustic guitar accenting. He recounts a story of a childhood shopping trip, which leads to his mother abandoning him. He presents the tale in even tones as though he’s recounting his afternoon brunch. Brosseau closes out the track with more sung reiterations that he is, in fact, a hard luck boy, with some Johnny Cash humming that doesn’t quite fit his bright, higher-sounding voice.
Next up is probably the best song on Perfect Abandon. Feeling like a Leonard Cohen traveling song set in the lonesome west, “Roll Along with Me” features some richer instrumental arrangements and Brosseau finding a pleasant middle ground between his vivid storytelling and musicianship. The song tells a simple tale of longing for a faraway lover. "Roll Along with Me" is sweet and simple with some nice little guitar parts that are destined to carry the listener down some sun-scorched piece of dusky pavement.
Hot on “Roll Along with Me’s” heels is the bittersweet ditty “Tell Me Lord,” whose gloomy wavering chords evoke a feeling of dizzy numbness. Brosseau sings of his loneliness to the black sky above in wispy howls.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn’t manage this balance of plaintive emotion and twee quaintness nearly as well. Most of the songs fall victim to Brosseau’s need to add description and wordplay wit to most everything. Verses struggle to fit into the instrumentation, making listening to the songs feel like a series of half-thoughts.
A prime example of this is the sweet seaside shanty “Landlord Jackie,” in which Brosseau vividly describes his unrequited flirtations with the eponymous landlord. Each line is so overstuffed that the whole, somewhat creepy, recounting feels like a nauseating stream of endless folky gushing.
“I bite myself down until each finger and toes are raw / No question I could go longer / The answer is always ‘uh-huh.’” What the hell is that, honestly? The entire song is full of these grating witticisms that do little more than leave one with a desire to stop the whole album. Thank god there is “Empire Builder,” a sweet little “Bron-Yr-Aur”-esque instrumental track after this just to help reduce the headache.
This overstuffed nature of Brosseau’s is ultimately what leads to Perfect Abandon being such a misstep. Verses are too dense to be held up by their supporting arrangements. Where instrumentation could shine or compliment is often instead just more wordiness. The album remains mostly listless throughout, with the ultimate impression that this journey never even got out the front door. Perhaps that is a more fitting modern folk journey anyway.
