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Alasdair Roberts
The Amber Gatherers
By Jesse Jarnow
The vaunted Scotsman of the Folk Revival revival, Alasdair Roberts returns with another album fit for campus consumption. Shedding the luminous Will Oldham-produced death ballads of last year's No Earthly Man, The Amber Gatherers finds Roberts on slightly more accessible territory. Spare to a large degree, the 11 cuts seem well-suited to cold days spent with large pints. With languid figures ("Where Twines the Path") and elegant, willfully archaic ruminations ("The Old Men of the Shelves"), The Amber Gatherers makes a fine companion LP to Oldham's recent The Letting Go.
Lyrically, Roberts turns out a marginally more focused version of Joanna Newsom's poetic obscurity (if only because Roberts' songs are generally 10 minutes shorter). They are no less dense, however. "I've been underground where wyverns are bound/And where gold and jewels abound/These I hoarded under my berry-brown wing," he sings on "Waxwing," which is actually one of the disc's catchier tunes. No, really. Besides his insistently abstract mopeyness, and the pleasantly authentic Scottish accent, though, Roberts sounds like adult-contemporary folkers from time immemorial (or at least since the ’70s). And that's not so bad. We all have to grow up sometime.
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