ALASDAIR ROBERTS TRIO (FEATURING ALEX NEILSON & STEVIE JONES)

Presented by: Pull up the Roots

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0	LONDON: Pull up the Roots @ The Slaughtered Lamb
P	Wednesday 30th November, 2016
N	7:30pm

Event information

Glasgow-based songwriter/guitarist/singer Alasdair Roberts is a restless artist indeed. Following on from the critically-acclaimed release of his latest, essentially solo, self-titled Drag City LP in 2015 as well as his work with The Furrow Collective (alongside Emily Portman, Rachel Newton and Lucy Farrell), not to mention recent collaborative vinyl-only releases with James Green (Big Eyes Family Players) and Chicago-based musicians Brad Gallagher and Bill Lowman, 2016 has seen Alasdair working again with two long-term collaborators – bass player Stevie Jones (Sound of Yell) and drummer Alex Neilson (Trembling Bells).

In January the trio relocated briefly from Glasgow to Analogue Catalogue studios, County Down, to begin work on a new album of Alasdair's songs, due for release on Drag City records in early 2017 under the title Pangs. Its quietly radical songs, rooted in the landscape of Scotland as much as in its musical history, address a typically broad range of themes – prayer and faith, childlessness and fatherhood, childhood and ageing, the concepts of couvade and kenosis and, with relentless inevitability, love.

The thread of spiritual quest which has come to characterise Alasdair's work, so richly explored in the 2009 album Spoils, is most definitely to the fore in his most recent material. Some of the songs of Pangs are already a part of Alasdair's solo set; the Slaughtered Lamb show on 30th November will be a rare chance for Londoners to preview some of this new material in trio form in advance of the album's release next year, as well as some older Roberts 'hits'.