Alasdair Roberts' musical foundations extend deep into the bedrock of the traditional folk of Scotland and the British Isles. Fuelled by restless curiosity and a scholar's attention to detail, Roberts has long split his attentions between interpretations of traditional material and his own original songs, while often leaving blurry the distinction between the two. On A Wonder Working Stone, his first collection of all original material since 2009's Spoils, the line separating the traditional from the personal is purposefully left fuzzier than ever. Stray bits and pieces from old fiddle tunes and Scottish bagpipe marches are woven tightly with Roberts' thorny lyrics to create elaborate, raucous medleys that can seem almost like a tin-can-and-string phone connection between the past and the present.
A Wonder Working Stone comes on the heels of two albums of traditional material, 2010's Too Long in This Condition and 2012's Urstan, a collection of old Gaelic pieces recorded with Mairi Morrison. By all evidence, the time spent researching and recording those albums stoked Roberts' creative fires as a lyricist. His songs here abound with passing images ("We'll be drinking like masons/ mixing the gunpowder into the wine") that sound as though they could've been discovered in some half-remembered book of folklore.
Roberts' voice sounds in fine fettle as well, and his reedy, keening brogue is the type of immediately distinctive instrument that is virtually impossible to imagine any listener accidentally mistaking for someone else's. Nevertheless, the "and Friends" included on the album cover is there for a reason; this is resolutely a band album. Roberts is joined here by an international host of like-minded talents, with the additions of electric guitarist Ben Reynolds and fiddle player Rafe Fitzpatrick particularly crucial to an overall sound that recalls the early 70s folk-rock fusions of Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. The album also features the occasional contributions of a horn section and strings from members of the Scottish early music ensemble Concerto Caledonia, but the arrangements are kept loose and casual, sounding at points as though these musicians had just happened upon each other down at their local.
"Tiny wren under the linden/ pondering in wonder the human conundrum," Roberts sings on "Wheels of the World/The Human Conundrum", the album's rambling 9-minute centerpiece. Borrowing strands from Scottish and Irish sources, this piece perhaps best exemplifies Roberts' musical and thematic approach for the album. Nearly every song here is marked by abrupt time changes and eccentric structural shifts that can make them seem almost episodic in nature, with elegiac fiddle solos or raucous sing-a-along choruses bursting in at unexpected angles. These musical mood swings do amply reflect Roberts' tumultuous lyrics, which frequently describe a landscape of lonely boneyards and lurking misery, peopled by such characters as "the queen of the unseen" and "friar of denial."
Despite these shadows, however, the overall mood is one of celebrating in the face of encroaching doom. (It's telling that the first song here is entitled "The Merry Wake".) The album's most rollicking track, "Scandal and Trance", might also be its strangest. Cribbing a melody from the traditional "We Shall Walk Through the Streets of the City", better known to singing cowboy fans as "Red River Valley", Roberts and group turn the track into a woozy and somewhat befuddling hoedown. Yet at song's end, when Roberts and group sing "Get over your tiny self/ all days will end in joy/ they'll never end in evil" it serves as a reminder of the communal and participatory nature of the folk traditions that Roberts so celebrates, and it is not difficult to feel like joining in.
