Tom Brosseau's last effort, Cavalier, was about as spare as album's get. It was mostly his voice right up front in the mix with his guitar lilting somewhere in the background. But fans looking for another hushed offering on Posthumous Success are in for quite a surprise. These songs are much bigger and richer than his previous effort, as Brosseau employs a number of guest musicians to help fill his songs out. He also recorded the album on both coasts, resulting in a variety of sounds. And if the sonic breadth of the album isn't surprising enough, the influences Brosseau claims for the album are equally all over the map. They range from Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor to Dylan's Time Out of Mind and the soundtrack to The Natural to polar ice caps and the oil derricks of western North Dakota. Tom Brosseau absorbs all these strange muses and new sounds and filters them through the unassuming quiver of his voice. The singer has always made filling meals of spare scraps on his records, so it should be interesting to see what he does now that he's heaping servings onto our plates.