The more David Thomas Broughton tells you what an awful bastard he is, the less inclined you are to believe him. The maverick’s third album streamlines the sprawling electro-dashed folk of its predecessors into a dual-pronged thrust of debased beauty and elegant despair (“I am a perfect louse, I bleed the goodness from your body”, ‘Perfect Louse’), but it’s his electrifying croon that lends this its wealth of weary charms – ‘Apologies’ longs wistfully to “set your body on fire”, while ‘Joke’’s regrets of a rocky relationship are tinged with a poetic, silver-tongued optimism at once deplorable and discomfitingly familiar.
Bleeding excellence from every pore, self-loathing never felt so worthy.
Jazz Monroe
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