Music Arcades: Alasdair Roberts: The Wyrd Meme

Yesterday evening, as we headed from the bath to my room, for the goodnight bottle-of-milk-and-story, I told the boy he was in for a treat: Alasdair Roberts. I must remember to stop using the word 'treat' so loosely, because, for him, it refers to lollies and chocolate biscuits. But once he'd got over his disappointment and the record had begun, he enthusiastically announced to his mum, "Alasdair Roberts!" (for a moment, she thought he recognised Alasdair just from the opening chords). Soon this became "Alasdair Rabbit", and then "Bunny Rabbit!" Shape shifting is that easy in his world.

This EP has a curious place in Roberts' discography, mainly because the man himself barely seems to acknowledge it. It doesn't appear on his website discography, and, to the best of my knowledge, he's never played any of its four songs at gigs.

I'm guessing that there's nothing more than simple oversight and coincidence behind this, however. While the title is naff, the songs seem like a natural link between the Spoils album earlier in 2009, and the amazing new songs that Alasdair's been playing live in the last 15 months or so.

In fact, the final track, Coral and Tar is right out of the top drawer of the Roberts songbook, managing to be both a kind of love song and a meditation on the substance of things, preservation (my bet is that the line about "a bog to be mired in" is a reference to cases like Lindow Man), structure, fusing and ossification, metamorphosis and rebirth. The cycle of life, in other words.

The Hallucinator and the King of the Silver Ship of Time, too, keeps growing on me, with its sly steal from Rod Stewart, or, more accurately, the Sutherland Brothers.

I wanted to read the lyrics of these songs, but they're printed in a spiral on the actual label of the record, rendering them useless when the record is playing. I got the download version as well from Drag City — not just for the lyrics, but it does come with a pdf where they lyrics are printed all in lower case with no spaces between the words. I went through and separated the words, one by one.

Alasdair's singing is at its best, combining vulnerability and righteousness. The players include his "early music" collaborators, David McGuinness and Alison McGillivray of Concerto Caledonia. There's plenty of space in the recording, smartly underlined by the occasional squall of squelchy synths.