Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall

Roberts has released a number of albums devoted to traditional songs over the course of the past two decades, 2010's excellent Too Long in This Condition being one of the strongest among them, and here, with Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall, he returns to the tradition, recording these 12 traditional songs and ballads solo and live in the studio, accompanying himself on piano and guitar.

The title comes from Child Ballad ‘The Baron O Brackley’, a tale of feuding neighbours and the Baron of Brackley's murder at the hands of his unfaithful wife and her lover. The high tension lines of conflict and murder score many a song in the tradition, as they do our contemporary lives, and Roberts delivers powerful, fully inhabited songs that may have seen the centuries pass through them, but without wasting them away, and their life and poetry lives on in these intimate, direct performances. The supernatural rears its locks on ‘The Holland Handkerchief’, history in the Jacobite allegory ‘The Bonny Moorhen’, livestock in the form of the lost cow lamented in ‘Drimindown’ and album opener ‘The Wonderful Grey Horse’. Roberts’ voice and arrangements across Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall are exemplary, and I’d rank this near the top of his sets of traditional song.