Hello and hi to another week of “No Skips,” a column where I go over albums in need of recognition that also have no skippable songs. David Thomas Broughton’s “The Complete Guide to Insufficiency” is another one of those records where you can’t tastefully blow past portions of it without just hearing the whole 39 minutes. This singer-songwriter record, like Will Oldham’s work, has an abundance to offer in sound instead of just acoustic accompaniments and strong songwriting.
Coincidentally, it’s nearing 20 years since its initial recording inside a church in Leeds, England, and subsequent release by Birdwar Records. The album is all done in one take, though Broughton didn’t have an audience like Fishmans’ from last week’s review. This quality of “The Complete Guide” gives the five tracks all a chance to ride out and segue into each other, as the lyrical content usually reaches a song’s midpoint before it devolves into humming or a loop of one line.
About the album’s cover — I’ll never understand why the levitating man with a briefcase is thinking about a seagull and why he must feel insufficient, but seagulls are simple creatures, so maybe the man would rather trade his mental and physical faculties to live on the water and not have to work. Or maybe it’s not my place to question his motives. Nevertheless, we’re off to an intriguing start before the play button has even been pressed.
“Ambiguity” begins normally enough — though this is avant-folk we’re talking about here — until Broughton begins to reverse the guitar melody, possibly with a Boss loop pedal he’s said to incorporate into his recordings. The result sounds like the uncanny “Ted-Ed” YouTube intro you’ve all heard at some point in your schooling career. With admissions including, “Such selfishnesses trivialize any tenderness as the coffee commands torture of my bowels,” the only thing unambiguous about this track is Broughton’s honesty. As I procrastinate my midterm studying by writing this, drink an almost-expired Starbucks Mocha and prepare to go to church, I heavily relate to this album already.
The ghostly harmonizing done by Broughton and the looped version of himself is intensified and made all the more haunting on the next track, “Execution.” A quatrain of lyrics about the speaker’s love for a woman outweighing any desire to defile her is repeated a few times before Broughton takes the melody and runs with it. He eventually somehow creates a wall of noise engulfing the listener like how John Lennon did with the Moog synthesizer on the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” except in “Execution,” I’m unsure what methods Broughton used to produce such an effect.
“Unmarked Grave” is more of the same, once again mentioning an unnamed female figure as Broughton speaks from the perspective of a deceased soldier. Any semblance of tangibility in his singing is gone soon enough, with “weeping” being the only word the listener has to grasp in the second half of the song. So far, the combination of a story where two lives are ruined by war and Broughton’s ultra-melancholic voice — along with the inclusion of an (actual?) funeral bell —constitutes this album’s emotional climax, though I guess it would be the inverse of a climax in the word’s traditional sense.
The beginning of “Walking Over You” almost turns into freak folk before Broughton drops another quatrain of four lines, which doesn’t specify a woman like the previous songs; instead, the speaker is speaking to someone about him and others taking advantage of the person. If you haven’t deduced thus far that “The Complete Guide” is very in touch with humanity, then the whistling on this track will likely convince you so, and this track in particular is cathartic. It’s the perfect companion to long nights of existential thinking where you’re only subconsciously aware of what you’re hearing — music for the end of the world or the final frontier, dare I call it. That may be a trope I will explore in future weeks, but for now, the final track maintains that mood.
“Ever Rotating Sky” is the finale we needed and didn’t deserve for all our insufficiency. Sounding like the most rehearsed track out of the bunch before this first and final take, there’s less of a sense of solemnity and more of hope, though I won’t misconstrue Broughton’s intentions because everything doesn’t need to have a happy ending. The eventual echoey loop of vocals and guitar he settles on is reset before each verse, an impressive technical feat considering the circumstances that allow for the nine-minute song to continually evolve.
Lyrics like, “To have felt the depths of life, and the drowning shallows of death,” as well as the song’s title contribute to the idea that the world will keep on spinning no matter how much we dig ourselves into believing that our time is finite — “our” time is — but time itself is not. Going back to the deceased soldier, even he was aware of his consciousness after his time was up, but how much does it matter? To call back to the seagull on the front cover — the seagull can’t think about itself or someone else in the way the man is pondering over the seagull. How much easier would it be to not be burdened with the doom and gloom of mortality and insufficiency? It would be easier, but we would never know it.