Spoils
Album | Alasdair Roberts
Foreign, fantastical, and forward-looking
Scottish singer/songwriter Alasdair Roberts started out as the leader of the loose collective Appendix Out in the mid '90s, coming off as sort of a U.K. Will Oldham, and indeed ending up on Drag City via Oldham's sponsorship. By the time he began working under his own name in 2001, though, he had assimilated a more traditional Scottish folk sound. As his fifth album makes clear, he wraps those trad-sounding melodies around lyrics that look to the Bardic tradition, Gnostic mythology, and Scottish poets like Robert Burns but are ultimately as modern and relevant as they are masterfully crafted. The instrumentation is relatively sparse on Spoils, with arrangements focusing on Roberts' finger-picked acoustic guitar patterns, coloring things tastefully with only whatever is called for at that moment, be it sprightly woodwinds or an atmospheric electric guitar drone. From melodic structures to lyrics and production techniques, the true genius of Spoils lies in the way Roberts bends folk traditions so completely to his will, and his knack for knowing just how and when to twist his songs towards something foreign, fantastical, and forward-looking.
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