Alasdair Roberts - The Songs of My Boyhood (2020)

Between 1994 and 2001 Alasdair Roberts recorded three albums, an EP and a handful of one-off tracks and collaborative efforts under the name Appendix Out. While fans still cherish these songs, Roberts – who these days brings his experimental approach to more traditional song forms – rarely revisits them in a live setting. But a long period of isolation has seen many of us turning to our pasts for inspiration or the comfort of nostalgia. For a lot of people, this simply means drinking wine, posting your ten favourite albums on Facebook or watching every episode of Button Moon back to back. But Roberts has used his time in pursuit of more worthwhile goals, and the result is The Songs Of My Boyhood, eleven Appendix Out songs re-recorded under the technical and practical constraints of lockdown in London.

Roberts admits that his motives for recording this album aren’t entirely clear. Still, as he says in the extremely illuminating essay that accompanies the physical release, he has just become a father. Perhaps this is Roberts’ way of taking stock, drawing a line under a certain portion of his life. Whatever the reason, it’s great to hear these songs in their revisited forms.

Roberts was just out of school when he began recording as Appendix Out, but from the quality of the songs, you wouldn’t know it. Much of that really early stuff was first recorded on a four-track (Roberts didn’t know how it worked and ended up using only two tracks), and the lo-fi aesthetic that made him such a great fit for US indie label Drag City was extremely evident. But listening to those old songs in their new form, you realise just what a prodigious talent Roberts was in the mid-1990s.

The earliest song here is Ice Age, written in 1995 and released the following year. It was half of the seven-inch that got him noticed by Will Oldham, a meeting of minds that led to the Drag City signing as well as many fruitful collaborations later on. The melody is deceptively simple, based around one of the unusual tunings that would become a hallmark, and the lyrical themes that Roberts would continue exploring over the next couple of decades – cosmology, mythology, deep time and human love – are all there, fully-formed.

There are three songs here from 1997 debut album The Rye Bears A Poison. Roberts’ signature acoustic guitar style – a tangy twang with a soft, melodic underbelly – underpins Frozen Blight, a slow winter waltz. Listening to it now, it’s hard to see how Appendix Out didn’t gain more traction with the burgeoning freak-folk scene that was to flower fully a few years later. Seagulls, Belts is another slow burner, perfectly suited to Roberts’ playing, which has become more tender and more dextrous as the years have gone by. Here the strokes are broad and impressionistic, and his voice is high and clear. Autumn, which closes out the album, remains one of his most powerful and – despite the minimal nature of the lyrics – most personal songs. The paring away of the more experimental leanings of Appendix Out allows that power and personality to show through even more strongly.

Second album Daylight Saving, which came out in 1999, is represented here by Tangled Hair, Arcane Lore and Exile. Tangled Hair reminds you how wintry, how beautifully bleak Roberts’ songwriting was back then. It seems like a direct progression – temporally, thematically and musically – from Autumn, and clearly bears the marks of his upbringing in rural Scotland, as does the earthy Exile. Arcane Lore is a tender love song, offering warmth and protection.

The Groves Of Lebanon, the only song from the third album The Night Is Advancing, has a haunting descending melody and is full of strange Old Testament symbolism, while First Perthshire House Song and Second Perthshire House Song are brief songs of companionship, the second being particularly evocative of place. Both were originally from split seven-inch singles, the first with the Leopards, the second with Jason Molina’s Songs:Ohia. The Language In Things, which first appeared on a Pastels-curated compilation in 2002, is one of Roberts’ finest songs from the period, and one of his last to be released under the Appendix Out name (though it was recorded much earlier). Some of the discord and sonic weirdness of the original is replaced in this new version by a minimal, nagging guitar motif. Like many of these reimaginings, it allows more space for lyrics and melody to emerge and create new relationships with each other, with the result that these songs often seem to have grown more open, more outward-facing, in spite of the conditions in which they were recorded.

The Songs Of My Boyhood won’t be the only album of reworked material recorded in 2020: the nature of isolation will likely cause a whole host of musical artists to reexamine their formative years. But the strength of Alasdair Roberts’ songwriting, and the fact that even his earliest songs have a melodic and lyrical maturity most musicians will never achieve, means that it will certainly be one of the best.