The Fiery Margin

Few singers directly impugn deities or muse on the fickle frailties of human flesh in their songs these days. Indeed, so wholly immersed in uncanny archaism are the songs of Alasdair Roberts that exposure to their fust philosophising can be a truly alarming experience. The Fiery Margin is the oddest tendril yet in the sprawling forest of Roberts' discography.

There's something awkward about this album, like a broken bone improperly set. The combination of jaunt musical backing with Roberts' wild-eyed philosophising on ‘False Flesh’ and ‘Common Clay’ feels disjointed but fitting. Again and again Roberts returns to scriptural turns of phrase and quasi-religious paradoxes. In the glowering chorus of ‘The Evernew Tongue’, apocalyptic proclamations accost lyrics celebrating the yearly ritual of the New Year's Eve booze-up. ‘The Stranger with the Scythe’ ushers in lapsteel guitar, saxophone and massed humming for the most unlikely Roberts' track yet: it's like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band playing country & western. Throughout, there's a tension between annual renewal and the end of all things, between apocalypse and cyclical time, between endless learning and finite lifespans. A salutary album, then, for an age turned upside down, in which wise children are unflinchingly confronting a climate-induced end to civilisation, while its withered, most powerful elders look on and mock.