ARTiST: Alasdair Roberts
ALBUM: The Wyrd Meme
BiTRATE: 147kbps avg
QUALiTY: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.97 Final / -V2 --vbr-new / 44.100Khz
LABEL: Drag City
GENRE: Indie
SiZE: 24.93 megs
PLAYTiME: 0h 22min 22sec total
RiP DATE: 2009-10-25
STORE DATE: 2009-10-23
Track List:
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01. The Hallucinator And The King 7:28
Of The Silver Ship Of Time
02. The Yarn Unraveller 4:37
03. The Royal Road At The World's 6:49
End
04. Coral And Tar 3:28
Release Notes:
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Following hard on the heels of Spoils comes the second offering this year from
Alasdair Roberts, an EP of four long tracks that brilliantly bears out the
conjunction of ancient and modern, mythical and analytical, in the title The
Wyrd Meme.
Set to guitar and mooning harmonium, and sung in Roberts' distinctive reedy
brogue, "Coral And Tar" has the tainted fragility of a double-edged love song by
Will Oldham, while "The Yarn Unraveller", with its imagery of "the ship
unlaunchable, yet forever doomed to sailing", recalls The Incredible String
Band's more elliptical myth songs û though they never paused a song midway for a
passage of feedback whines. Mythic beasts appear in suitably serpentine rhymes
in the apocalyptic account of "The Royal Road At The World's End", before being
summarily dismissed û "Oh no, the ourobouros looms in the sky before us, morphs
into a foul abraxas, falls from the sky and attacks us û you think you're gonna
scare me with your fuckin' taxidermy?". But it's "The Hallucinator And The King
Of The Silver Ship Of Time" that best displays Roberts' ingenuity, yoking
together the antique and contemporary ("With an eider quill retrace our annals,
ungating all the snares, unpanning channels") to tell the tale of a drowning
woman saved by the titular monarch.