Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Vol. 11-Hey! Look What I Found [Import]
Best of the Ceili Bands V.1 [Import]
Music: Project Viking [Import]
Bills Bills Bills Pt. 2 [CD-single] [Import]
Air Mail Music: Russian Balalaika Orchestra
Are You Breathing: The String Quartet Tribute to Disturbed
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Concerto 1/Brahms: Piano Concerto 2 [Import]
Amazon.com
Ali Roberts makes spare and spindly music that sounds as though it could have been written beside a hearth in Colonial America rather than in front of a two-bar heater in a late-'90s Scottish bedsit. Like his idol Will Oldham, Roberts finds great breadth of expression by using the simplest of tools. A graceful guitar, a viola, and an autoharp serve as the bittersweet backdrop to these songs of natural beauty and slow-moving emotions. A breaking voice adds an aching touch of solitude to each. As "Our Sea" imagines two lovers on an icy walk through town, one asks, "If we bought a house / What would be embedded in the walls? / Lambswool cloths and bullets of the old war." At about 20 beats per minute, this music is the total opposite of the "extreme" music used to advertise soda pop and acne medicine. And that is a comforting and peaceful change. --Lois Maffeo