Alasdair Roberts, a wonderful Scottish singer/songwriter, is a man of many alternate tunings. On his forthcoming record, The Amber Gatherers(Drag City), Roberts provides the tuning for each song in the liner notes. This music conjures up a little bit of peat smoke, images of wind-swept vistas, bog people, animal-pelt/seaweed tang of funky single-malts, the dole, fierce Calvinism, lighthouse technology, David Hume, the Kaleyard School, all those good things. It’s vaguely Celtic, but not in an oppressive public radio kind of way (one song is about something or someplace called "The Scabbard of Priapus" – for real.)
2 comments:
This song is "vaguely Celtic" in the same way that James Brown was "vaguely funky," or that The Ramones were "vaguely punkish." That said, I dig it.
The Latin word for scabbard is "vagina", and Priapus was a Greek fertility god of a "purely phallic nature."
Post a Comment