Pitchfork

It happens: Potential favorites are easily lost in the shuffle. Some albums remain unheard in piles of promotional CDs; others emerge by chance after a lengthy hibernation to make a delayed march to the disc player. Lucky for us, UK bard David Thomas Broughton's excellent The Complete Guide To Insufficiency falls into the second camp. I've never been a huge fan of Plug Research, largely because experimental electronic music isn't my thing. On top of label bias, The Complete Guide's bland cover art and generic title are ill-fitting. Overlooking these initial strikes, I played the album anyway only to find myself hitting repeat, literally for hours.

That was a couple of months ago; now, along with Richard Youngs' Naïve Shaman and Six Organs of Admittance's Compathia, Broughton's acid-folk cycle is a late-night favorite. Dripping with inky ambience, his hypnotic sick-souled mantras are simpler than Chasny's and comparable to Youngs' recent outings, but without the playful Arthur Russell flourishes. Broughton keeps the instrumentation spare: acoustic guitar, looping pedals, minimal drum machine, well-spaced accents (distortion streaks, bells, wooden percussion). At the center is his gorgeous hangdog voice, which recalls a less taciturn Nick Drake with the vocal mannerisms of Antony blended into the dusty, mystical ambiance of Vashti Bunyan.

Broughton's a patient conjuror, allowing five tracks to clock in at just under 40 minutes. Reportedly recorded in a single take at Wrangthorn Church Hall in Leeds, the compositions bleed together with only slight variation. The church wasn't simply a goth gimmick; the building really seeps into the songs. For example, the bells that close "Unmarked Grave" were supposedly a mistake, a fortunate byproduct of putting things to tape between the incense and pews.

The first track, "Ambiguity", opens on two minutes of guitar, looped frontward then backward, as if buoying Broughton's lyrics, which are both darkly surreal and heartbroken. "Ambiguity"'s actual incantation begins with existential questioning: "How much love can a boy contain in here? How many contradictions can a girl posses up there?" When the song's pace subtly quickens, he moves into the realm of declarations: "It's easy to forget where you came from, if there's no question of your return." The line most indicative of the album's atmosphere-- draped in suicide, murder, and insecurity-- closes the piece: "I struggle with the nightshade in my blood/ I really shouldn't say it, I really shouldn't say it/ But, I just love what the water does." Then, when he's said his peace, Broughton doubles his voice-- a technique recalling Antony's gospelisms. These moments of non-articulation, of self-harmonizing are typically the standouts of any given track.

The next piece, "Execution" starts with Broughton's ohms alongside his playing and tapping of a guitar. Once the somber, plodded mood's established, he layers a vocal line over the backing track. Lyrically, it's a bit of a love song: "I wouldn't take her to an execution/ I wouldn't take her to a live sex show/ I wouldn't piss or shit on her, would I?/ Because I love her so." Scat fans may find this a narrow definition of a relationship, but the point's well taken: It's an I would walk 500 miles kinda thing for the down and out.

Surprisingly, "Unmarked Grave", the tale of a soldier's rotting body and his lonesome gal, is just about joyful in the aftermath of "Execution"'s ominousness. (Tellingly, the dead guy's mortally wounded with arrows-- Broughton is often reminiscent of some Medievalist, and death by machine gun wouldn't seem right.) It's here the gentle church bells lend the track a funereal beauty, etching themselves into Broughton's one-man, multi-tracked Gregorian chant.

The album's weakest song, "Walking Over You", is also its most conventional and, thankfully, its briefest. Closer "Ever Rotating Sky" ostensibly looks at cannibalism/rape ("The violation of your body, the pieces they fall into the holes, flakes of skin in my mouth, petals trodden into the carpet"), and it resembles the three stronger earlier tracks on a noisier tip. For the last gasp, Broughton carts in a tinny drum machine (rattles/clicks/report), cutting his voice and the instruments into a patch of Reichian chaos. The dicing and reconfiguring eventually mutates "rotating sky" into "rotting inside." It's an eerie though perhaps unintentional effect.

The Complete Guide To Insufficiency might be too homogenous for some, but fans of folk's apocalyptic, alchemical side ('sup, David Tibet) won't have much to complain about. Over the past year, neo-folk's continued to spin into different bifurcations; the glossy hipsters-as-hippies proving less interesting than artists mining stranger material. Aligning himself with scratchy brethren like Nick Castro, Badgerlore, Devendra Banhart's earlier self, and the aforementioned Youngs and Chasny, David Thomas Broughton's debut ought to catapult him somewhere near the head of the bearded class, even if his stateside peers have yet to let these brilliant psalms work their magic.

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