Three weeks ago I went to see David Thomas Broughton play at the Basement in London’s City Arts and Music Project (CAMP). A bit of a delayed review, you might think… well, yes, it is, and that’s because it’s taken me this long to work out what I thought of the gig. Here goes…
On record, I like his music. It’s beautiful, it has a wonderfully stark, malevolent ambiance, and it is kept from being standard, “one man and his guitar” fare by the subtle employment of loop-pedal-layering and an un-precious approach to percussion. Unsurprisingly, I expected to see the same qualities in evidence at this gig; they certainly were, but so too was an apparent determination on DTB’s part to prevent his audience from having a straightforward engagement with the essential prettiness of what we were hearing, something which he achieved by drowning many of the songs in abrasive feedback. For me, this was extremely frustrating, because I like pretty guitar parts, and mournful, sonorous vocals, and I like to be able to appreciate them without too much effort; nevertheless, the underlying beauty of his songs was definitely still, underlying everything, which is something.
From a technical point of view, it was fascinating to see and hear this music being played live, a process that DTB has turned into something of an art form. Though the songs are quite distinct from each other, there was some sort of common procedure at work in their realisation, which seemed to roughly follow these guidelines:
1. Play a pretty guitar part, loop it
2. Add complimentary guitar parts, loop them
3. Put your guitar on the floor and stand up
4. Sing some lovely, plaintive vocals, loop them
5. Add harmonising vocals, loop them too.
6. Kick your idling guitar in a whimsically inadvertent manner to provide a bass-drum-boom, loop it
7. Throw some clanky objects – a capo, some jangly bells, anything close to hand – at the wall, or at a chair, adding more rhythmic texture, loop the resulting sounds
8. Get another guitar, an electric one this time, create a blanket of feedbacky squall, loop it
9. Sing a bit more, but don’t loop it
10. Cut nearly almost all of your loops out, leaving only one or two playing
11. Start playing your next song, beginning at stage 1.
All this was executed very deftly, and the technical demands of building-up these songs did not prevent Mr. Broughton from adding a further, theatrical dimension to his performance. Throughout the show, he mimed, postured, clowned, and eccentrically danced around the stage; an arch physical narrative to accompany the piecemeal construction of his songs, by turns amusing and weird. This wry theatrical delivery combined with the improbably layered music to make him come across, as my friend insightfully put it, ‘a bit like a magician’.
Frankly, I thought all this extra stuff is a bit superfluous. I really enjoy the subtlety and gentleness of Mr. Broughton’s recordings; the layering and showmanship of the live show, impressive and entertaining though it was, lost its novelty quickly, and the noisy dirge that eventually engulfed most of the songs was definitely on the wrong side of grating. It seems to me that the more beautiful elements of his music, the parts I find most affecting, were excessively obscured by burlesque and intentional cacophony, things that were not in themselves unenjoyable or out of place, but that might have been used more judiciously.
Anyway, I still think David Thomas Broughton is great, and pretty unique, and deserving of credit for being wilfully weird and willing to make a racket out of, and over, the folky rudiments of his music. I just won’t stand a metre away from the speaker stack the next time I see him play live.