Farewell Sorrow
After more than five years, three LP's and several 7" singles as Appendix Out, Scottish singer and man of letters Alasdair Roberts is bidding farewell to his nom-de-musique. What once was Appendix Out (essentially, Alasdair with Gareth Eggie, Tom Crossley and other friends) is now and forever Alasdair Roberts. The broadest work in young Roberts' canon so far. Heavily steeped in the lineage of European folk, the words and music of Farewell Sorrow evoke a spirit of youth, an air of reckless abandon, a passion not meant to stay in this world.
These days, it seems like everybody wants to be folk. Some people have argued that punk rock, with its easily ...
From the mid-'90s into the 2000s, the world of indie pop obsessed over the '60s pop production and arrangements pioneered by the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and for a decade it seemed that the culture at large was revisiting the '60s and '70s without much in the way of innovative updates. One can only assume that part of the reason for lack of noticeable advances is that 30 years isn't really enough time to have elapsed for these themes to be revisited from a truly different angle, which is what made Alasdair Roberts' take on indie pop so striking.