Tsui

Half Man Army

Self-released 

www.tsuimusic.com (full record is currently available as a free download on this site)

www.myspace.com/tsuimusic 

It’s never been tougher going for a guy with a wounded heart and an acoustic guitar to stand out in the crowd. Constant advances in home recording technology mean that pretty much anyone who fancies themselves a poetic soul and knows a few chords can make their own one-man run at being Conor Oberst via their MySpace page. Unfortunately the democratization of digital music recording and distribution hasn’t exactly resulted in a musical utopia; mostly it’s led to a surfeit of underwhelming recordings by “aspiring” singer/songwriters, making it increasingly hard to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to bedroom bound troubadours. It’s enough to make a music critic want to throw up their hands and give up the fight, banishing all self-produced home recorded albums to the trash. But then, every once in awhile, I stumble across a record like Tsui’s Half Man Army and am pleased enough by the discovery that it makes enduring the search more than worthwhile.

Brooklyn-based musician Tsui (aka Mark Kraus) self-produced his largely home recorded debut, but the man’s clearly far from an amateur. Album opener “Shorthand” begins its life as a solo acoustic and vocal experience, but is eventually joined by a gorgeous string figure, warm electric bass tones and pristine harmony vocal line – it’s the first of many tunes here that shows Krause knows how to paint quite effectively on his admittedly limited sonic canvas. Kraus' slightly quavering vocals and occasional slip into f-bomb ready emotional theatrics - ex: “I’ll say too much I’ll say everything wrong. The whole gets fucked up so I’ll just get lost." - will inevitably draw some early Bright Eyes and or dreadful emo comparisons, but rest assured that Kraus largely aims for – and attains – something grander than mere adolescent catharsis through his tastefully arranged tunes.

An album best suited for rainy day contemplation, Half Man Army’s ten mid-tempo tracks have a tendency to blend into one another in a haze of agreeable keyboard gurgles, breathy vocal overdubs, polished acoustic guitar play and gentle electric guitar fills. The music only occasionally veers off into unexpected territory, like a downbeat piano ballad (“Over and Over Again”) or a track with a more forceful rhythm section (“Half Man Army”), but given the nature of Kraus' set-up, the lack of an expansive sound hardly qualifies as a criminal offense. A record modest in scope yet commendable in execution, Half Man Army proves there are still plenty of riches hiding in the vast sea of home-recorded noise.

"Dead Letters" from Half Man Army