Album Review

Spoils

Alasdair Roberts
Spoils

[Drag City; 2009]

8.0

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

You know all those singer-songwriters who get called "intelligent" just because the coy cultural references they make are so easily gotten by anyone else who reads McSweeney's? Yes? Well, fuck them in the eye socket with their own falling-apart thesauruses! Better yet, fuck them in the eye socket with an Alasdair Roberts record-- with this record, Spoils. Because, damn, Alasdair Roberts has made the best album of his 14-year career. And while it's very smart, you might not even know that it's as smart as it is until after you've heard it a dozen times. That it's so strong considering it's a weirdo folk-rock record with lyrics like "I was bilious and saturnine/ As I walked from shrine to wayside shrine" is almost a miracle.

Writers like to compare Roberts' work to that of Will Oldham's. Hardly a word gets written about the guy without first mentioning that what Oldham does to American trad folk, Roberts does to its British counterpart. Seeing that they share the same record label, have worked together, and both obviously fuck around with the idea of "folk" in their own ways, it's not the worst comparison. The way Roberts pushes the envelope for Brit. Isles-based music is perhaps closer to the way that singer/guitarist Nic Jones' justly-revered arrangements of ancient forgotten whaling shanties and murder-suicide ballads updated those songs by adding new melodies carefully picked on his guitar. But no one's going to confuse Roberts' version of "The Magpie's Nest" with Shirley Collins', or his take on "When a Man's in Love" with Chris Foster's. And though the guy has made entire traditional albums, he's not a traditional artist. This record is all originals, and it's very strange, if subtly so.

These eight songs pick up where 2007's genre-tweaking Amber Gatherers left off. But they also resonate with the melodic goodness of his stripped-down 2001 debut, The Crook of My Arm. And you could say that they regain the occasional freak-out intensity of Roberts' work with/as Appendix Out. The main developments over prior recordings are sonic and structural: the super ripping guitar that cuts through on "Hazel Forks"; the heavy electric guitar that kicks in halfway through the seven-minute "The Flying of Grief & Joy (Eternal Return)"; the doubled-up flutes on "You Muses Assist"; the thunder cracks and violin peering through behind cascading nylon strings on "Under No Enchantment (But My Own)". The songs often muck about to create new structures: bits of a ballad form collapse in on parts of a reel that collides with sort of a pop anthem. Is it prog? The album makes this listener want to live inside a cozy little cottage in the countryside, something made of wood and stone with ancient leaded windows covered in moss, so maybe.

The way Roberts' often high-pitched brogue wraps itself around sentences is pretty as hell; his voice has never sounded better, nor has it been recorded this clearly before. There's a sense of humor at work with Roberts that meshes quite well with his poetic way with words. It takes multiple listens to get at the tunes' meaning, and not just because of differences between the mother tongue and the American one. It's hard to argue with the sentiment of "Ned Ludd's Rant (For a World Rebarbarised)", which could be from an album by London garage-rocker Dan Melchior: "Now we rob graverobber's graves and redisplay the plunder/ And we fill some dead composer's staves with irony and thunder," he sings, before ending the song with, "That's only what this old guitar puts into my mouth."

— Mike McGonigal, June 25, 2009


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The Amber Gatherers

Alasdair Roberts: The Amber Gatherers

Farewell Sorrow

Alasdair Roberts: Farewell Sorrow

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