Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine. Roberts will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.
Roberts: In Our Time is probably my favourite non-musical radio show. Hosted by Melvyn Bragg, each week’s edition of this long-running show invites four special guests on air to discuss a given subject in depth. The programmes are categorised on the show’s website under the headings of culture, history, philosophy, religion and science, and the subject under discussion could be almost anything from “the history of ideas”: a random selection would include such topics as “modernist utopias,” “slavery and empire,” “happiness,” “paganism in the Renaissance” and “chance and design.” Sometimes on evenings when I’m having trouble sleeping, I’ll listen to episodes of the show online, and have the feeling of absorbing a lot of knowledge and learning a great deal about the subject under discussion—but of course, by the following morning I’m fairly sure I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve heard. I think that it’s a useful repository of discourse around a lot of areas of human knowledge, which is worth dipping into periodically.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1rXNchgqi8
