Description:	CD on Rough Trade
	Format:	CD
	Genre(s):	Folk/Folk Rock
	Label:	Rough Trade
	Price:	£13.19
	Availability:	Sold out / currently unavailable. Sorry!

5
...according to our Clinton on 31 December 2006.

I'd probably say that I was Alasdair Roberts number one fan. I mean with no disrespect to anyone else who adores his music I'd like to put myself forward for the position (if he wants a number one fan that is otherwise I'll keep my distance). Anyway he has a new album out on Rough Trade (hoping for a post James Yorkston cash in?). I really love this stuff though I always prefer his music when its stripped down and minimal. Theres plenty of instrumentation on show here which threatens to bog the album down half way through but Alasdair like the trooper he is manages to pull through. Fans of the Appendix Out albums are gonna love this but if you've ever had your heart tweaked by Bonnie Prince Billy or James Yorkston then you are gonna love this too. Farewell Sorrow is well worth checking out!!

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What their label says...

In this second solo outing from the leader of Glaswegian underground/folk band Appendix Out, Alasdair Roberts melancholy, sometimes off-kilter voice narrates the listener through an arcane realm where gods command, women shapeshift into goslings and nature rules over flowering heaths and wild waters. If that sounds horribly twee and pastoral, dont panic. This ensemble of original material is original in every way, notwithstanding certain echoes of Incredible String Bands motley eclecticism, the pained isolation of Nick Drake and the neat integration of bits of British traditional music. This latter trick points up Roberts skill: Join Our Lusty Chorus includes portions of Copper Family staple Sportsmen Arouse, Carousing utilises the tune to Bonny At Morn and familiar lyrical snatches surface elsewhere, but theres no hint of tokenism or bandwagon-jumping. Its informed, sensitive, entirely apposite. Someone named Polly (Truelove? Muse? Literary device?) appears in five songs by name and elsewhere, one suspects, by implication: as love object in the macabre I Fell In Love; as instrument of lust in Come, My Darling Polly - a solo piece whose quasi-contemporary imagery of black olives and red wine juxtaposed with archaic chastity belts and scolds bridles sets a tense temporal anomaly. Other songs might have emanated from The Mabinogion (Down Where The Willow Wands Weep) or Lothlorien (The Whole House Is Singing). Sparsely decorated with guitars, bass, drums and occasional glockenspiel, mandolin and piano, Roberts territory is unselfconscious, vulnerable, intelligent and dead cool. At first hearing Farewell Sorrow is weird and shambolic; at second its elemental and natural; at third its beautiful, literate and compelling. Whatever that elusive X-factor is, Ali Roberts has it.