The similarities with Will Oldham
increase on Daylight Saving (Drag City, 1999), an even more
melancholy, almost gothic, work.
The fragile dirges (Foundling, the sad waltz Merchant City)
and the delicate love songs (The Scything, Row Upstream)
of the band seem to belong more to the Appalachian Mountains than to the
Scottish hills.
The single Lieder Fur Kaspar Hauser (Western Vinyl, 2000) is even
more abstract and rarefied. The ballad Ein Grauerstar In Der Kavallerie
is barely whispered in a dreamy atmosphere. The acoustic
instrumental An Den Nachthimmel Gewohnt swims in the galaxies.
The progression towards a trance-y, rarified, sterilized music
continued on The Night Is Advancing (Drag City, 2001)
with tracks like A Path To Our Beds, whose distressed crooning
disappears in a lake of hypnotic strumming and light jazzy drumming,
Year Waxing Year Waning, an invocation inspired by
ritual Buddhist music,
Home, a lullaby that seems to be falling in a spacetime warp,
and the transfixed mantra of Campfire's Burning.
Not surprisingly, a few songs achieve the classical simplicity and beauty of
chamber music (The Groves Of Lebanon).
The whole spirit of this album represents a quantum leap forward for the band,
but one piece in particular stands as the high point of their career so far:
Fortified Jackdaw Grove,
an eight-minute emotional black hole whose
slow, hallucinated prayer floats over a translucent tapestry of
spare instrumental sounds (mainly piano and clarinet)
against a drone of bagpipes. It sounds like the
slow-motion playback of a free-jazz jam.
Ali Roberts' limited vocal skills, on the other hand, dampen the
folkish Golden Tablets Of The Sun and
Cyclone's Vernal Retreat. The moment the trio starts playing music,
they lose 90% of their appeal.
The exception to the rule is the closing ode, Organise A March, that
(borrowing a melodic theme from Donovan's Celeste)
packs all the emotions that were carefully removed from the rest of the album.
Alisdair Roberts' first solo album,
The Crook Of My Arm (Secretely Canadian, 2001), is a collection
of traditional English and Scottish folk ballads.
The EP A Warm and Yeasty Corner (Shinglestreet, 2002) contains five
covers.
Amalgamated Sons of Rest (Galaxia, 2002) was a collaboration among Will Oldham, Jason Molina of Songs:Ohia and Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out.
Alasdair Roberts's second solo album, Farewell Sorrow (Drag City, 2003),
is quite an improvement over the first one (which really wasn't "his" anyway,
being merely a collection of standards).
Appendix Out's revealed Roberts' cadaveric vocal style but set it into
contexts that were mainly melancholy. Roberts' new album can surely be mournful
when it needs to, but it would be misleading to categorize the work as a whole
as "melancholy". There is a sense of pride, dignity, solemnity that rises above
the distress of the bard. In fact, most songs radiate an austere pomp.
The feeling is one of ancestral themes, one created at the very outset by
the slow, spartan medieval litany of Farewell Sorrow. Its balance of
majestic and tender recalls early Donovan.
The "medieval" theme is pervasive throughout the album, particularly seductive
in the delicate madrigal I Fell In Love, enhanced with accordion and
flute, and in the catchy, uplifting
When A Man's in Love He Feels No Cold.
Far from being monotonous and predictive, each lullaby relies on a different
kind of delivery. The album's stand-out, the waltz-like
Join Our Lusty Chorus (derived from a traditional song)
employs gently lulling middle-eastern cantillation.
Another waltzing refrain, The Whole House is Singing, his best
serenate, truly conveys the feeling of a happy home.
The upbeat I Went Hunting is even contrasted by the
feverish counterpoint of a quasi-psychedelic guitar,
and the piano-based singalong of I am a Young Man has the nonchalance
of the music-hall.
Occasionally, Roberts can't resist the power of his elegant lyrics (influenced
by fairy tales and romantic poetry) and builds a song around a nice concept
without enough musical foundation, but overall he has crafted a convincing
recreation of century-old storytelling styles.
This is Robert's most expressive and charming collection.
Alasdair Roberts's
No Earthly Man (Drag City, 2005)
displays the same virtues of its predecessor but the material is generally
weaker (drawn from traditional death ballads), and too many songs seem influenced by the alt-country fad of the USA.
Roberts' The Amber Gatherers (Drag City, 2007) sounds more cheerfully
pastoral than his previous solos.
Riddle Me This and Where Twines the Path
sound like vintage Donovan before he turned hippy.
The highlights of Spoils (Drag City, 2009) are the seven-minute
solemnly medieval-sounding The Flyting of Grief and Joy
and the eight-minute gently mournful Under No Enchantment.
These are both sparsely arranged pieces.
They are very much in the tradition of the British folk revival of the
Sixties, as if Roberts had traveled back in time, back towards the roots of
all of his generation's bards.
The shorter songs are more lively and rhythmic
(You Muses Assist, Unyoked Oxen Turn,
but hardly revolutionary.
The EP Wyrd Meme (Drag City, 2009) contains his first rocker,
The Royal Road At The World's End.
Alasdair Roberts' Too Long In This Condition (Drag City, 2010) was his
third collection of traditionals, and probably the most traditional-sounding
of all.
Urstan (2012) was a collaboration between Roberts and Gaelic folksinger
Mairi Morrison.
Roberts returned to original compositions on
A Wonder Working Stone (Drag City, 2013).
If several songs evoke folk-rock classics of the 1970s, from the
Fairport Convention (Brother Seed (with a stirring organ-driven bridge) to the
Incredible String Band (The Merry Wake),
peaking with the
lugubrious Van Morrison-ian meditation Fusion of Horizons
and the
Leonard Cohen-ian Gave the Green Blessing,
there is undoubtedly more substance than usual in the
eight-minute existential ballad The End of Breeding and the anthemic
Bob Dylan-ian
nine-minute lullaby The Wheels of the World/Conundrum.
Musically, the zenith is perhaps the dixieland-jazzy, barrelhouse-bluesy and marching band-ish humorous pastiche of Scandal and Trance, like
Pentangle jamming with
Taj Mahal.
Too bad he can't resist launching into jigs and reels even when he is in
his most philosophical mood.
