Tom Brosseau
Grass Punks

If you are looking for complexity, experimentation, strong messages, sharp edges, punches to the stomach, and similar things, this is not the album for you. Otherwise, welcome to the remote, rural, and verdant North Dakota, from which Tom Brosseau hails, a folksinger undoubtedly unassuming, and even more undoubtedly talented. What "penalizes" him is precisely his style: at least in this album, he relies solely on acoustic instrumentation, crafting simple, light, relaxed melodies, devoid of any complication and pretentiousness. Some might find it almost colorless, bland, but Tom Brosseau is a brilliant and humble craftsman of folk melody, who with charm and irony compensates for his demeanor as a humble country boy.

I had the chance to listen to a couple of albums from this talented songwriter, active since 2002: "Grass Punks" from 2014 and "A Perfect Abandon" from the following year. "Grass Punks" is the more minimal, and the most successful of the two. A little less than half an hour of music, delightful interweaving of guitars and mandolins, brilliant "little songs," arpeggios that stick in your mind with that effectiveness that only simple things can have. "Grass Punks" is fully in line with some Donovanian principles particularly dear to me: easy, flowing melodies, almost bordering on nursery rhymes, constantly dreamy atmospheres, that kind of approach that tinges the more cheerful episodes with sly irony and softens the slightly more melancholic ones with a veil of lightness, a light vocal style, never "forced," never over the top. All in an American-bucolic key.

The eight songs of "Grass Punks" (plus a short instrumental) are all beautiful. All, without any exception. "Love High John The Conquer Root" would have fit perfectly in "A Gift From A Flower To A Garden," it is the most ironically surreal branch of a root common to all episodes, a pattern that changes without ever overturning, showing different nuances each time. The clear and crystalline sound of "Gregory Page of San Diego", the more fluid and relaxed, delightfully hypnotic sound of "I Love To Play Guitar", a light prairie sirtaki, more or less, "Cradle Your Device" that advances weightlessly, trembling carefree, the soft warmth of "Stuck On The Roof Again", a lazy and drowsy ballad in an impeccable way. There would be a minor flaw, namely this stupid sad and grayish cover, but it's the only one that comes to mind. Otherwise, "Grass Punks" is beautiful, that's it, that's all I wanted to tell you.