Tom Brosseau Cavalier WB rating out of 100

On Cavalier, American troubadour Tom Brosseau yearns for a bygone era; a time when all you needed was an acoustic guitar and a set of engrossing tales to captivate an audience. The Delta Blues men did it and Woody Guthrie did it; today the likes of Conor Oberst, M Ward, Joanna Newsome, Jose Gonzalez and Devendra Banhart do it with aplomb. Gonzalez has even garnered popular cross-over appeal in a Top 40 world obsessed with polished, cacophonic, over-produced drivel.

You need something special to cut it in this day and age, though – even among hardcore ‘folk-a-philes’, you have to possess that certain something that makes you stand out from the crowd. For Banhart and Newsome, it is their quirky freak-folk, and for Gonzalez, Oberst and Ward, their flawless musicianship and lyricism see their indie-folk rise above the pack.

Brosseau is more of a traditionalist, however; there is no room for a hyphenated genre here. Unfortunately, by rejecting progress, this North Dakota native has eschewed the very thing that makes the modern folk artist engaging: a desire to marry old with new, push boundaries and take risks. Alas, Brosseau has opted for none of these approaches on Cavalier. ‘My Peggy Dear’ best sums up the album; vocals up front (in a sterile mix by John Parish), clean shuffling guitar, and Grand Ole Opry lyricism. Indeed, the Opry scorned amplified instruments and the drums for many, many years and Cavalier adopts a sympathetic approach. After a few tracks you come to crave the propulsion of a nice, crisp drum kit to move things beyond the horrendously languid.

There are fewer than a handful of moments that form any resistance to the rest of the album’s predictable nature. ‘Committed to Memory’ chugs along like the pioneering steam trains of the frontier, at least showing some grit and a willingness to get its hands a little dirty. ‘My Heart Belongs to the Sea’ uses, to haunting effect, some piano that seems to mimic the reflection of the moon on the rippling eddies of the ocean’s surface; lyrically, however, there is little joy to be recovered within these fleeting glimpses of the less-than-ordinary. Like the rest of the album, metaphors that cast nature as a harsh temptress just don’t fare well within a genre that demands more than ‘trad’ to keep the ‘folk’ happy.