David Thomas Broughton's five-track, 40-minute album, "The Complete Guide to Insufficiency," was recorded in a single take in a church in Leeds, England, with Broughton playing guitar, singing and making occasional use of a drum machine and extensive use of a loop pedal. It's one of the stranger and more appealing things I've heard recently, with songs that drift in and out of focus, build into mantras and dissolve into daydreams and all add up to something very powerful. Broughton's instrumental sensibility is in the outsider music vein of so-called freak folk, disheveled, sloppy, often barely holding together; his voice is, rather unexpectedly, quite similar to Antony's, throaty and rhapsodic and steeped in soul.
-- T.B.
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