Alasdair Roberts’ pensive ballads reflect humanity, maintain modernity
Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine.
Part of Roberts’ appeal has always been the starkness of his music, the raw feeling you get from the songs, though with his new album he says he’s going for a warmer sound. “I think this is based on my conception that recording in the analogue domain will produce warmer-sounding results than recording digitally,” he says. “A Wonder Working Stone (Roberts’ previous album) was recorded entirely digitally, on Pro Tools, whereas much of the new self-titled record was recorded to two-inch tape at Green Door Studio … I suppose the new one is also a bit more of an intimate record.” This intimacy extends to the lyrics as well, which seem at times to be extended meditations on love, though meditations that are reflected back through Roberts’ lyrical thicket.
The old ballads of Scotland have always been a key influence on Roberts’ music, though he’s careful not to ascribe too much of his new album to them. “When writing songs, however much the influence of those older ballads might be felt within them, I am still conscious to create fresh new songs rather than retreads or—far worse—pastiches of traditional ballads,” says Roberts. “It’s true that those old Scots ballads often feature gruesome or otherwise dark narrative elements, which I suppose is reflective of the reality of existence at the time of their creation or emergence … but then, it could be argued that reality is no less dark or gruesome nowadays—I suppose it only takes a quick browse of any daily newspaper to realize that. It seems clear that art exists in some way to address those aspects of the world, and the ballads are one manner in which, historically, the people of Scotland and the wider world have done so. But more broadly, I think that the ballads as a whole do a pretty good job of covering just about every aspect of what it is to be human.”
With a rich heritage behind him, Roberts joins the long, historic ranks of Scottish ballad writers who molded the form of the tradition to fit their own art. His music today sounds timeless and arcane, yet also modernized. As you listen to the album, you find yourself leaning in closer and closer to your speakers, turning up the volume, and the more you focus on these songs, the more they push back on you.
—Devon Leger
