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.
Showing posts with label Luke Roberts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luke Roberts. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Luke Roberts
Blurt is still running reviews this week...and I've got one up today.
Luke Roberts
Big Bells and Dime Songs
(Thrill Jockey)
"One time...I spit and hit a dime," Luke Roberts' growls over a spare, rough-hewn scrim of picking. His "Dime Song" sounds as if it were recorded as if in the back room of a deserted bar in the bleary beginnings of a morning after. His voice breaks and stretches over the notes, mournful and exhausted and beaten. It's an old-time sound, the kind of thing that ought to have been recorded, originally, on wax cylinders. It speaks of hard times and discouragement and endless persistence with few rewards, an artifact, perhaps, from the Great Depression. Yet Roberts is 20-something, scraping by in post-credit crunch America rather than the 1930s. He laid the track down a year or two ago, with Harvey Milk's Kyle Spence sitting at the boards of his Athens, Georgia recording studio. His spiritual contemporaries may be Karen Dalton and Woody Guthrie, but he is about the same age as Lady Gaga. Strange world, isn't it?
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Luke Roberts
Big Bells and Dime Songs
(Thrill Jockey)
"One time...I spit and hit a dime," Luke Roberts' growls over a spare, rough-hewn scrim of picking. His "Dime Song" sounds as if it were recorded as if in the back room of a deserted bar in the bleary beginnings of a morning after. His voice breaks and stretches over the notes, mournful and exhausted and beaten. It's an old-time sound, the kind of thing that ought to have been recorded, originally, on wax cylinders. It speaks of hard times and discouragement and endless persistence with few rewards, an artifact, perhaps, from the Great Depression. Yet Roberts is 20-something, scraping by in post-credit crunch America rather than the 1930s. He laid the track down a year or two ago, with Harvey Milk's Kyle Spence sitting at the boards of his Athens, Georgia recording studio. His spiritual contemporaries may be Karen Dalton and Woody Guthrie, but he is about the same age as Lady Gaga. Strange world, isn't it?
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