Luke Roberts

Another one from Luke Roberts...who lives in that Woodie Guthrie/Bob Dylan/Pete Seeger-ish region of semi-anachronist troubador folk

Luke Roberts
The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport
Thrill Jockey

There was an itinerant air to Luke Roberts’ first album Big Bells and Dime Songs, released first on Ecstatic Peace and later, last year, on Thrill Jockey. It sounded as if he’d arrived carrying a guitar case and not much else, and would, upon finishing the songs, be shuffling off to parts unknown. The songs were rough-hewn and profoundly eccentric, the kinds of tunes a guy might write to himself holed up in someone’s barn between hitches on the road from who knows where to whatever comes.

The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport is an altogether more settled affair, coming out of a still unvarnished, still sparsely furnished but unmistakably more secure environment. Even the name of the album, with its nod to streets in Brooklyn, speaks of a fixed address. He wrote these songs in a place where he could close the door, and where the debut felt, at times, unnervingly exposed, Iron Gates has a sense of center, balance and calm.

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Stereogum offers "His Song"

I also reviewed his first album for Blurt late last year.