David Thomas Broughton & Juice Vocal Ensemble

David Thomas Broughton & Juice Vocal Ensemble

Sliding The Same Way

(Song, By Toad)

PUT a folksy singer and an experimental female vocal trio together in a room in West Yorkshire for a few hours, and the result is as fascinating as it is unconventional. David Thomas Broughton's singing style is the very definition of "acquired taste", a deep and rounded voice that's somewhere between plummy interwar radio crooner and, way up the register, Antony Hegarty from Antony And The Johnsons. His songs, with their minimalist arrangements and left-of-centre lyrics ("I lived with my mother until I died as a child" and "Although I'm an unshaven boozer, I do all my drinking in town"), are never quite what's expected. But thanks to the input of the Juice Vocal Ensemble, every track is a soundscape unique to itself, from the beatbox gospel-swing of Been A While, to the cathedral polyphonic glories of The Promise, to the salt-shaker percussive effect of Yorkshire Fog. Sometimes it's as if the songs have been written, then broken into their component parts to lie, glittering, across the running time.

Alan Morrison