Alasdair Roberts
The Crook of My Arm
[Secretly Canadian]
Rating: 7.2
Back when I was a wee lad, my father used to sing to me the folk songs of
England, Scotland, and Ireland. He would pull out the family guitar, a
battered, beer-stained acoustic with some serious tuning issues, call the
whole family 'round, and celebrate his British heritage with a series of
lovely folk ditties. And it scared the living shit out of me.
Granted, parts of the above story are purely atmosphere. The "family" guitar
was given to me by a neighbor when I was two, and while it did suffer from
tuning issues, it was neither battered nor beer-stained. The "whole family"
consisted of myself. And my father's ancestors did not hail exclusively from
the British Isles-- some came from the over-hyped wine, cheese, and cowardice
factory that is France, while others were Native Americans, whose particularly
gruesome folk songs were no match for the English and their smallpox blankets.
But it is true that my father used to sing me a lot of British folk songs. And
it's also true that a lot of them used to scare the crap out of my five-year-old
self.
Like a good deal of folk music, the songs my father sang me addressed lost
love, grieving, and sadness. Unlike other songs I'd heard, however, these
topics were almost always intertwined with death. Think Ween's "Cold Blows
the Wind," except not a joke. Widows followed their husbands' rotting
corpses to their graves. Drowned corpses visited their former lovers in
terrifying dreams. At the time, I was creeped out, but in retrospect, there
was a quality of epic beauty and sadness to those songs that can be undeniably
moving.
The Crook of My Arm sees Appendix Out frontman Alasdair Roberts tackling
a dozen folk songs, addressing issues of lost love, found love, unrequited
love, and love across class lines. And gardens and traveling and shit.
Basically, it's just Roberts, armed with his croaky, shaky voice and his
acoustic guitar, tackling some classic folk songs. As with any album
consisting of covers, some songs are quite a bit better than others, but
Roberts' unique voice and laid-back yet oddly intense delivery (and the
simple structures of all the songs covered) make The Crook of My Arm
a cohesive, if not a bit lugubrious album.
"Lord Gregory" opens the record on a high note-- a tune of dead babies, lost
love, and betrayal. A mid-tempo number with a gorgeous melody, "Lord Gregory"
is simply a nice, enjoyable song. "Lowlands" is perhaps the most lyrically
stunning track here, with lines like, "He was green and wet/ With weeds so
cold.../ I'll cut away/ My bonny hair/ For my love lies drowned/ In the windy
lowlands." More so than any other track on the album, "Lowlands" showcases the
kind of poignant, tragic imagery that makes so many of these folk songs so
great.
The rest of The Crook of My Arm is made up of more of the same-- gently
delivered folk. It's easy for an album as uniform as this to blur into a
pastel-colored background, which is really a shame, because the aforementioned
tracks, as well as a few other standouts, are simply gorgeous. As it stands,
though, The Crook of My Arm is too homogenous and ploddingly paced to
have any kind of resonating impact. I was hoping that this record would leave
me with images of overwhelmingly tragic love and devotion. Instead, I'm left
thinking of beds, flowers, and pleasant romance along the countryside of
Britain. I guess you can't have it all.
-Matt LeMay