 | | Reviews | | |  ALASDAIR ROBERTS
No Earthly Man
Drag City DC283CD
So, saturnine Scots singer and enfant terrible Alasdair Roberts doesn't consider himself to be part of the folk scene? Fair enough. Henry VIII probably never thought of himself as medieval. This may be down to some calculated sense of modish self-preservation but Roberts is dallying with perceptions.
Despite his impeccably lo-fi alt-rock credentials - Roberts enjoys the patronage of Will "Bonnie Prince Billy" Oldham, who also produces here - No Earthly Man proffers much archaic discourse on infanticide, fratricide, ghostly heathland processions and fatal meals of eels boiled in broth (not to mention scraping fiddles) and is thus more of an anomaly to the rock set than to adamantine folk votaries steeled by years of hardcore exposure to ancient crackling field recordings.
To square the folk-indie circle, No Earthly Man is conceived in the sadisist gloom of the Velvet Underground but clutches Oe'r His Grave The Grass Grew Green - Volume 3 of Topic's Voice Of The People series to it's blood-stained breast. Therefore, Lord Ronald, Two Brothers (with its distant yet clattering and intimidating backdrop of funeral drums and metallic squeals) are as unrelentingly mirthless as one could ever hope to encounter in a genre which seems to pride itself on tragedy. Even better, Lyke Wake Dirge really does sound like the first version in folk history to be performed by real actual dead people.
Roberts may be backwards in coming forward as a folkie but No Earthly Man shows us his snarling teeth. He's a wolf - a wolf in sheep's clothing but a wolf nevertheless.
Kevin Maidment - March 2005
More from Alasdair Roberts in our reviews archive.
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Folk & Acoustic
