Alasdair Roberts & Friends
Album: A Wonder Working Stone
Label: Drag City
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.alasdairroberts.com

It's the devil's own job keeping up with Alsadair and his recording ventures! Limited-edition releases, short-runs, singles, switching labels and lineups, guesting on others' sessions - this guy's alarmingly prolific, but you can be sure that anything he does is worth making an extra effort to investigate. And so it proves with his latest full-length project, which finds him strutting his folk stuff in front of a full electric band yet emerging in no way diminished by the experience.

Alasdair's roll-call of "friends" is impressive too, and in addition to the nucleus of Ben Reynolds (electric guitar), Shane Connolly (drums), Stevie Jones (bass) and Rafe Fitzpatrick (fiddle), includes the famously reclusive and recording-shy Olivia Chaney, also Michael John McCarthy (accordion) and occasional appearances by Alison McGillivray, Ross McCrae, Tom Crossley, Donald Lindsay, Howie Reeve and Richard Merchant. Whatever its composition on any individual track, the band unit is supremely versatile, exercising acute restraint or spaciously rocking out as demanded, yet always remaining at the intelligent service of the songs and their shifting parameters.

Alasdair's previous album, Too Long In This Condition, consisted entirely of his arrangements of traditional song, whereas A Wonder Working Stone consists entirely of his own originals - and yet these prove almost indistinguishable from the traditional models on which they're based (as is clearly inferred by the text of Alasdair's erudite notes that adorn the admirably lavish booklet, which expounds rationales and inspirations with copious references). Brother Seed is the most blatantly tradition-referenced item on the disc, its refrain being audibly derived from Child Ballad 19 (King Orfeo), while the gorgeous melody of The Laverock In The Blackthorn has clear kinship with that of Plains Of Waterloo (although Alasdair's notes equally plausibly cite a Scottish Gaelic song and an Irish pastorale), and The Merry Wake provides sufficient apt musical and textual metaphors for the whole album in its shifting of moods and structures. It can be hard to gauge exactly what's going on, and much of the lyrical content is decidedly thorny and provocative, so this is music that requires your persistence. But Alasdair's ever-confident authority and attitude wins through and unashamedly facilitates that blurring of those boundaries between tradition and fresh creation whereon his songs are conceived; it's a bit like if the ISB had embraced electrification more fully around the time of Wee Tam and subsequently taken more cues from deeper tradition and mystical philosophy instead of retreating and expanding into the wider cultures of Amerikay and worldly hippiedom.

Alasdair displays a serious ingenuity in song construction, and the resultant complexity of structure enables an abundance of incidental delights. There's the joyful pipe march (The Conundrum) that emerges intrepidly out of The Wheels Of The World and then retreats again to enable a rousing trad-Irish chorus to hold sway in triumphant conclusion. And then there's Song Composed In December, with its radical juxtaposition of Burns-inspired seasonal commentary bedecked in brassy (monkey) apparel (as befits the time of year!), and capped with a Welsh rap (I kid ye not!) to the Bluebell Polka (which is also cheekily paraphrased in the ramshackle central section of Scandal And Trance… On the latter track, the mournful mardi gras of Red River Valley processes through the streets of the city introducing us to Alasdair's jolly-jester figure who gives us the guided tour, exhorting us gaily to "Get over your tiny self, because all days will end in joy, they'll never end in evil".

A Wonder Working Stone is one of those enigmatic discs that - much like those ISB albums - can mean something different on almost every listen, and in which each playthrough may reveal additional levels of subtlety and meaning. Just when you think you've got a handle on one aspect and it makes sense, it confounds and surprises and slips from your eager grasp; thus one invariably emerges with the desire to get into it all further at the earliest possible opportunity - O, were there more than 36 hours in the day!…

David Kidman