Music Arcades: Alasdair Roberts: The Amber Gatherers

It can be a risky and disheartening business, being a fan. It requires a degree of wilful deafness to bear the frequent disappointment of new releases that don't live up to the shards of genius that you and a few other unlikely souls have glimpsed in the past. The other side of the coin, when the fractures heal over and the whole reveals itself, meeting and exceeding all expectations, is much more rare. I'd say The Boatman's Call was one example. I've been an Alasdair Roberts fan since hearing A Warm and Yeasty Corner, but I never had sufficient imagination to anticipate that he would ever make an album as breathtaking as The Amber Gatherers.

If I didn't have a three-and-half-week-old son, I'd happily spend the best part of my day charting some of the wonders of this record. Others have noted how Roberts "transubstantiates into some sort of cog in a Jungian machine of Scottish collective consciousness". I guess he does, but what impresses and moves me is the way he packs so many levels and meanings into ostensibly simple songs. Let me have a stab at illustrating with a few examples, starting with River Rhine.

Within it's three and a half minutes, this song holds a search for beginnings ("Where does the River Rhine rise?"), echoing J.G. Ballard's Day of Creation, and also a love song ("When I look in her eyes / I see the River Rhine… / She sees the Clyde in mine"). There's what appears to be a bit of sly innuendo about, errr, transubstantiation through exchange of bodily fluids ("On the margins of the Clyde, running with the Rhine inside / And the Clyde inside the River Rhine/ And so her eyes in mine") — all cloaked in what could almost be a Dada nonsense poem with internal rhymes and close repetition of vowel sounds (Rhine/Clyde/mine/eye/inside). And — as the complementary video of Andy Goldsworthy's art alludes to — it's all rooted in patterns in nature ("In the towering towering towering ashes /the ashes tower, elm-enshaded / And her lashes flay green-bladed / The trees decay, the trees decay and fall").

I love the way Roberts draws out the onomatopoeic potential in 'ordinary' words, as in his delivery of the coda to Where Twines the Path, where, having earlier "listened to our language lose its former grammar", he nods off to sleep and the tempo drifts into dream logic, with the uhs and ohs slowwly rolllling round his mouth:

Whenever nods my head, I will go to bed
…
And dream of where the sows of England   rut and snuffle
Where the summer truffles cluster   in the hollow
Where the stags lock antlers and   give joyous bellow
If the path should lead me there,   I'll gladly follow

I cried every time I heard Waxwing, even before I was a dad. In the song, the bird is questioned by a sceptical interrogator about his arduous life and whether his labours, gathering the amber, serve any worthwhile purpose. Again there is a coda to the song, after the sceptic throws down his final challenge:

And waxwing, waxwing, what will you do
When your days of fathering are through
When at last grim death comes a-knocking?

At first, listening inattentively on an iPod, I thought the song ended there and what followed was a separate track. But it's all one song, and I'm not going to tell you what the waxwing's answer is — you'll have to listen for yourself — but it's one of grace and dignity that doesn't shirk his life's meaninglessness. In another man's words, "you and me we've been through that / and this is not our fate / so let us not talk falsely now."

All the songs are originals, presumably written in the last few years. They use archaic language and folk imagery unashamedly, but also make veiled references to our wired world. Firewater seems to be a meditation on knowledge being built on polarities, or seeing two sides of the coin. Firewater itself is both an oxymoron and a reference to Alasdair's favourite drink. But our understandings are always in jeopardy, at risk of being frozen before their time — caught in amber, if you will — when we write them down and organise them:

Dates are beaten to a paste and laid within our databases
From that paste we make our mortar, quickened with the firewater
Then of course we hew the granite from the deep part of the planet
Sky above us, soil beneath us, we'll build our library of aethers

What is this aetherial library if not the Internet, a Borgesian alchemy that turns fire, water, earth and data into an intangible cloud of meanings? I'm letting myself get carried away here, but this album describes a world where Wikipedia and the samphire on the seashore are weft and warp of the same arcane magic. The tunes are good too.

In a reversal of the pattern with Farewell Sorrow, I bought this album first as an MP3 download, and then bought a vinyl copy at Alasdair Roberts' gig at the Luminaire last April. (The first casualty of fatherhood was that I missed his show with Alex Neilson at the same venue a couple of weeks ago.)

Of course, there's a downside to The Amber Gatherers: from here on my expectations are higher. I'll buy everything he releases in perpetuity, and each time I'll try to convince myself that it's in the same league as this album. I'll be very happy if even a quarter of it is, for this is very near the top of my top 50.

Oh, I nearly forgot: I put forward a case to name the Boy Alasdair, in honour of both Mr Roberts and Mr MacLean of The Clientele. Lucy vetoed it.