alasdair roberts: stereo: glasgow
i once facetiously described alasdair roberts’ music as occupying some bastard bermuda triangled no-mans land between shakespeare, the corries and will oldham. none of this meant in the pejorative you understand. i love the mans music (and wordsmithery). all’s i was getting at was the clash, the coming together, the mix and matching of the traditional with the contemporary. something he does pretty damned well. he creates worlds, own tiny worlds within songs, esoterica and historical exotica, with their own language and arcane history, rooted in the real real past and the mad mad fables of the elizabethan.
spoils is his third/fourth? album for drag city. it certainly ups the instrument quota from his brittle bare bloody bones earlier work. the record and the new all-singing no-dancing live band setup seems to have moved him back into appendix out territory. spoils features dulcimers and hurdy gurdy. the live show’s yr standard fiddle, guitars, percussion set-up.
s’not even recognisable as what folk recognise these days as folk. you know, some earnest young ‘un with a knack for fingerpicking and gwyneth paltrows’ diary. but folk it is. of the most intricate baroque styling. wordplay that’ll melt yr mind and a way with time signatures and tunings and a story and a song and the past present and future.
what’s that… oh yeah anyway there was a gig i was at. but it was many many beers ago. it was pretty damned good from what i recall. carousing got the rock-out fuzzed-up six organs of admittance treatment. it was (like his records) at once whimsical and brutal, genuinely beautiful yet visciously ugly. see the creepy medieval grindhouse slasher movie aesthetics of long lankin:
where’s the little heir of this house? said long lankin. he’s asleep in his cradle said the false nurse to him. we’ll prick him, we’ll prick him all over with a pin and that’ll make my lady to come down to him. so he pricked him, he pricked him all over with a pin, and the nurse held the basin for the blood to flow in…
and then the wholesale slaughter begins.
on reflection i’m not sure why i’ve posted this waffle but post it i have. i guess my vague and laboured point is he plays proper folk (if that’s even what it is these days), his live shows are easily worth parting some of yr barely earned cash and you should own all of his records. the video below says a million times more than this shite. and he made a record with will oldham and jason molina. yup…
