As the seasons turn over, and the years run like rabbits, the changing
days find changing pop-cultural ways. And, of recent, the attention paid
to the humans making any sort of folkie music has altered radically.
When Alasdair Roberts cut his first solo record — a set of traditional
folk songs called The Crook of My Arm — in 2001, not many noticed;
the disc was lost in the shadows of the third album cut by Roberts' main band,
Appendix Out, that very same year. It dared to find the lonesome
Roberts singing in a thick Scots accent, and hardly gained any
hipster points by openly citing the influence of folk-revival heroes
like Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins, Nic Jones, Dick Gaughan, and Barry
Dransfield. Roberts showed this was where his heart truly lay, though,
by letting Appendix Out die a natural death thereafter (letting that
combo's Tom Crossley turning back towards his International Airport
outfit), and by embracing his folk-revival revival wholeheartedly. His
second solo outing, 2003's Farewell Sorrow, introduced Roberts as the
modern-day heir to that movement, his collection of inspired originals
placing him as a unique contemporary figure, someone whose earnest
evocation of acoustic-music/Anglo-Celtic traditionalism seemed most
un-postmodern; he shared the same purity of spirit as those early-music
enthusiasts of the 1960s. Two years later, however, the word "folk" is
suddenly loaded, and is utterly fatal when preceded by the pseudo-word
"nu," with anyone owning a Sufjan Stevens record, apparently, into some
sort of genrefied "folk movement." It's unlikely the Banhart crowd will
fall for No Earthly Man, the latest longplayer in Roberts'
increasingly impressive discography. Produced/played on by willing
collaborateur Will Oldham (and also featuring former Appendix Out homies
Crossley and Gareth Eggie, plus indie-pop pinup Isobel Campbell), it's a
sombre, sorrowful collection of traditional death hymns: poisoning
ballads, infanticide ballads, fratricide ballads, shipwreck ballads.
Walking at a funereal gait, the gear works to slow its folk songs to a
snail's pace, the deathly-slow saunter the better with which to
cultivate a ghostly atmosphere. Roberts' robust croon is matched with
haunted harmonies wailed by Campbell and the Bonnie Prince; Campbell's
droning cello and the nimble-fingered fiddling of John McCusker play
forlorn figures whose friction-on-strings/bowed vibrato seems like so
much (gentle) weeping. From a strictly traditionalist sense, the disc
resembles the post-rockification of such source material; but, compared
to the modern-day minstrels that pass for new-millennial folksmen,
Roberts seems like he hails from an entirely different era.
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