Alasdair Roberts

Pangs

The Glasgow-based folky goes electric (again). No one shouts “McJudas!” On this, his ninth (nominally) solo outing, Alasdair Roberts’ instrument credits include electric guitar, metallophone and synthesizer. He’s joined by bassist/keyboardist Stevie Jones and drummer (and “canine yelper”) Alex Neilson, among others, to parlay music that while irrefutably ‘folk’, gleefully shoves aside traditionalist tropes in favour of a buoyant, full-bodied combo sound that, passingly, recalls prime Fairport Convention while proffering a beguilingly mellifluous identity of its own. Roberts has been discreetly ushering British folk forms towards unchartered places for the best part of two decades now, sometimes, indeed, with electric instruments, but when his adenoidal-toned narratives play out against the cascades of jubilant, almost African guitar and exuberantly plashing drums of An Altar In The Glade, or wind around the uncharacteristically urgent pulses of The Angry Laughing God, it feels like folk rock has been relocated to new and alluringly sunlit uplands. David Sheppard