Even by his prolific standards, it has been a busy couple of years for Scottish singer-songwriter Alasdair Roberts. There was A Wonder Working Stone, the 2013 album billed to his group Alasdair Roberts & Friends, and Hirta Songs, his full-length collaboration with poet Robin Robertson. Then last year saw At Our Next Meeting, the excellent debut album of traditional folk ballads by his new group the Furrow Collective. So it seems noteworthy that, after all of these various collaborations, his latest Drag City album comes self-billed and self-titled. Often when such a veteran artist releases an eponymous album it is for purposes of redefinition, but Alasdair Roberts feels more like a simple re-centering, and a paring back of his music to the purest essentials.
As most of his recent work should make abundantly clear, Roberts creates folk music without much need for any additional prefixes or modifiers. It has long been his practice to balance his original songs with a deep appreciation for the traditional folk of the British Isles and, as the Furrow Collective have put it, "balladry at its darkest and quirkiest." On Alasdair Roberts he sticks exclusively with original material, although a simple scan of the song titles ("The Mossy Shrine", "The Final Diviner") might camouflage that fact. Compared to such previous solo works as 2009’s Spoils, and certainly to the more raucous group work on A Wonder Working Stone, Roberts’ songs here are quieter and simpler, and his language less ornate. And while all of Roberts’ music, even at its most traditional, has sounded unique and intimate it has seldom sounded this personal.
Although these songs are more concise, Roberts retains an abiding love for dense lyricism, internal rhyme schemes, and melodies that wind their way along like wild vines gradually unspooling over stony ruins. And his keening Scottish brogue remains as rich as fresh cream, so any attempt to fully interpret his lyrics with American ears is a pathway to misadventure. But from where I sit, songs such as "Artless One" and "This Uneven Thing" might stand as the barest, most undisguised love songs in Roberts’ catalog. The latter is an especially affecting lament of long distance or unrequited romance, and it’d take a steely soul to not be moved when Roberts sings "If I had known before we courted that love would be this uneven thing/ I’d have packed my heart in box of iron and chained it down with a leaden ring."
It should be noted that although Roberts gets solo billing here he is far from alone. On nearly every song his voice and nimble guitar lines are joined by Alex South’s clarinet and Donald Lindsay’s tin whistle, as well as backing vocals from singing quartet the Crying Lion. The presence of so much tin whistle, in fact, might be a stumbling block for listeners who associate the instrument with too many bad St. Patrick’s Day memories or the Titanic soundtrack. This is no fault of Lindsay, however, and here the wind instruments add undeniable atmosphere and do much of the heavy melodic lifting on more rambling tunes like the ruminative "Hurricane Brown".
Elsewhere on the album Roberts seems to take a step back to address the state of folk music itself and the role of the artist in a troubled world. Throughout the record he sides with the underdogs and the outsiders who choose to take, as one title puts, "The Way Unfavoured". On the closing "Roomful of Relics" he describes the loneliness of the folklorist’s life. "Men have withdrawn and left me alone in a roomful of relics," he sings in what seems a combination of pride and chagrin, "but I carry the song that all men inherit." And as this album shows once again, that inherited tradition is very safe in Alasdair Roberts’ expert hands, and it is treated here with an uncommon tenderness and simplicity of vision.
