Alasdair Roberts: Spoils

I promise I didn't cheat to line this up for Christmas Day. If I'd cheated, I'd have had it four days earlier. Though I guess I still have a good excuse to cite Alasdair's recent performance of The Twelve Days of Yule — a song he credited to Sir James Frazer, Robert Graves and Mircea Eliade, though I can find no trace of it on the web.

I've seen Alasdair play nine times this year. That's a record even for me (and for the carbon footprint record, I travelled by public transport seven of those times and on foot the other two). The first time was at The Goose is Out in January. I was really excited by the prospect of Alasdair having the luxury of two sets, and was hoping to hear some new songs, to see if they could match up to those on The Amber Gatherers. We got four of the songs that were to come out three months later on Spoils — and remarkably they were all dazzling. Dazzling in their ambition, striking out in quite a different direction from what made the last album so wonderful, and in their fearlessness with 'difficult' language. Having a cigarette on the terraces of Dulwich Hamlet Football Club afterwards, Guy, Annie and I chuckled at the lines we could remember. Things like "the cosmos is desacralised / Now the world must be rebarbarised" and "Embalm one half in chamber lye and abandoned in some gully / Half hung on the gallows high for folly and vainglory" (I admit I didn't remember all of that one).

Dazzling is one thing, you'll say. Substance isn't always the same. I had this CD on pre-order to be sure of getting it before we headed off to the Lake District for a week in early May. I listened to it a lot then, and at the two London shows Alasdair played in May and June, just marinating in the songs. But it wasn't until these past few days, when I listened again with the hindsight granted by the new songs since Spoils, that I was completely convinced.

You see, a cynic might speculate that Alasdair just saw how Joanna Newsom pulled of Ys and fancied a bit of that action for himself (he's on the same record label as Newsom). But when he played the Incredible String Band's Maya at their Barbican tribute shindig you could see he was looking back to earlier precedents (and I don't just mean 1969).

And it's amazing how prolific he's been. There's been another EP since Spoils (admittedly both were recorded last year), and still at his most recent solo gig in London, he played nothing from either of these releases, but six (I think) new original songs. Not one of them sounded like a duffer.

And these new songs shed a little more light on the direction and intent of Spoils. Alasdair talks of writing "syncretic" songs that meld together disparate ideas. The Book of Doves is one example, imagining some alchemical joining of an esoteric Russian encyclopaedic book of knowledge with Columba, the Irish Christian missionary who settled on the island of Iona in the Sixth Century. I've also heard him refer the unreleased song, What Cares the Crow for the Plaint of Lapwing, which references the arcane writings of Christian Rosenkreutz, as syncretic. This syncretism seems tied into a longstanding interest in the unity of opposites that goes back at least as far as the title track of Farewell Sorrow:

But know my friend, my dearest friend, please know this
That Life is but Death's own right-hand man,
In every piece of his own left-hand business.
So, arm in arm, we'll run toward that pair
And, we as they, joined and double-threaded.

On Spoils, The Flyting of Grief and Joy is another tale of double-threaded oppositions. It's apparently inspired by the image of the Ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail to form a circle — which also informs the album's cover.

You can tell that I'm gushing uncontrollably here, but you don't mind, do you? Just have another slice of Christmas cake and another glass of whatever you fancy and later on, you'll have a sense of being bloated by something stodgy and undigestible, but the details will be long lost. I was almost certainly gushing when I spoke to Alasdair after his second "Goose" performance of the year. The only detail that will probably never leave me is asking him about the spelling of "Haruspex" from another new song, The Haruspex of Paradox. He repeated it patiently three times, but as I'd had one too many beers by then, it wasn't sinking in. That song, by the way, apparently draws on the legend of Loki from Norse mythology and Sulis Minerva, the goddess of the springs in Bath.

The pagan and esoteric references in the songs are multiplying. And I love that. I love any writer that gives themselves a grand backstory. Stephin Merritt did it breathtakingly with his channelling of a whole century's popular songcraft. I can't help but see these backstories as an invitation to do some superficial web research and annotation, so I present below my work-in-progress guide to some of the less mainstream usages in Spoils.

In the last few months, though I still love the other Alasdair dearly, I can't help concluding that this one is the greatest writer and performer of the decade now closing.

• The Flyting of Grief and Joy:
• Flyting is a contest of insults, often conducted in verse. The term "flyt" is Scottish for "quarreling", or "contention". After the Middle Ages, flyting became obsolete in Scottish literature, though the tradition itself never completely died out among Celtic authors.
• A sistrum is a percussion instrument, chiefly associated with ancient Iraq and Egypt.
• Chamber lye was urine collected from chamber pots, used for stain removal and pre-wash soaking, and also for removal of natural oils from wool, and set dyes, not to mention its many uses in medicine (source).
• "Zoraster and Mithras" — Mithras/Mithra seems to have multiple and sometimes vague uses. In Zorastrianism "the first day of the month Dey, known as khoram ruz or khore ruz (the day of sun) belongs to God (Ahura Mazda). Since the days are getting longer and the nights shorter, this day marks the victory of Sun over the darkness. The occasion was celebrated in the ancient Persian Deygan Festival dedicated to Ahura Mazda, and Mithra on the first day of the month Dey." (source) Mithra (Miθra) is the Avestan language name of the Zoroastrian divinity (yazata) of covenant and oath. But see also sol invictus:

Sol Invictus ("the undefeated Sun") or, more fully, Deus Sol Invictus ("the undefeated sun god") was a religious title applied to at least three distinct divinities during the later Roman Empire; El Gabal, Mithras, and Sol. A festival of the birth of the Unconquered Sun... was celebrated by the Romans on December 25. On this, the first day after the... solar standstill of the winter solstice, the duration of daylight first begins to increase..., interpreted as the "rebirth" of the sun. With the growing popularity of the Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth came to be given much of the recognition previously given to a sun god, thereby including Christ in the tradition. This was later condemned by the early Catholic Church for associating Christ with pagan practices.

• Dark Triad (or the dark triad of personalities) is a group of personality traits which people would generally define as undesirable. It is called a “dark triad” because it consists of three main personality deficiencies: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
• The Book of Doves:
• Columba also known as Colum Cille (meaning "Dove of the church")... was an outstanding figure among the Gaelic Irish missionary monks who, some of his advocates claim, introduced Christianity to the Picts during the Early Medieval Period.
• The Book of Doves, a painting or paintings by the Russian, Nicholas Roerich
• Angels of Mons "On 24 April 1915, an account was published in the British Spiritualist magazine telling of visions of a supernatural force that miraculously intervened to help the British at the decisive moment of the battle."
• In the song, the Book of Doves is found in the Candida Casa, the church established by St Ninian in Whithorn, Galloway, southern Scotland, in the mid fifth century AD.
• Hazel Forks
• Troy-Town maze: many turf mazes in England were named Troy-town... presumably because, in popular legend, the walls of the city of Troy were constructed in such a confusing and complex way that any enemy who entered them would be unable to find his way out.
• Under No Enchantment:
• Dog's mercury: Mercurialis perennis, commonly known as dog's mercury, is a woodland plant found in much of Europe, but almost absent from Ireland, Orkney and Shetland. It is highly poisonous.

If you know more/better on any of these areas, please, please, do correct me in the comments below.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album

Comments

[Brian]

Ye Gods. Wow. Hard to read the Christmas Day entry from an iPhone and I look forward to doing so when I'm back in Dublin on my new MacBook Pro. Christmas in Ballinskelligs is so beautiful. I assume you have heard both "We Are Having A Hootenanny" and "Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree". So excited David.
I suppose I ought to write about Alasdair Roberts here though, under your what-has-to-be-a-record-length post. I have you and you alone to thank for recommending Alasdair's "The Amber Gatherers".
Happy Boxing Day and all that.