By: Chris Ball
Luke Roberts | website | facebook |
Released on October 14, 2016 via Thrill Jockey
It doesn’t matter if you’re not familiar with Luke Roberts and his music as everything is laid out on ‘Song to Remember’, the opening cut on his new album Sunlit Cross. Over bright, optimistic but simple acoustic guitar Roberts informs us in his confident but reedy and sincere voice “I’m a man who sings…and I’m a helper and I give back” and later “and I ride trains...”
What Roberts is doing here is laying out where he is right now, where the last four years of quite extensive travelling have brought him to. And he’s doing it in a very simple, unaffected way, with a little help from some musical friends.
It was those musical collaborators that lead me to Sunlit Cross, well, they say judge a man by his friends and when an album features guests such as John Neff of Drive By Truckers and Kurt Vile, whom Roberts had previously supported, then my interest is piqued. Despite those fairly well respected guests this is very much a personal and singular statement from a man seemingly at the point of making some big discoveries about himself.
Roberts spent some of the time since his last album, 2012’s The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport, living very simply with a Kenyan family, and much of their way of life and outlook has rubbed off on Roberts and crystallised something within him about his faith and his relationship with the world. Yes, Roberts has some well respected helpers on this album, but it is Jesus who gets all the praise. Hearing such frank and unabashed Christian sentiments expressed can be a tricky prospect for the less spiritually inclined listener, such as myself, but even leaving the lyrics aside there are many lovely tunes to be enjoyed.
Luke Roberts describes the album as a conversation between himself, the listener, and “God, everything, everyone.” He has a lot to say, a lot he wants to tell us about how he intends to live through his faith, but it is done quite lightly in the main, with a gentle, gossamer touch: his vow on the slow lolloping lullaby of ‘All American’ that ‘we’re gonna put American music in the heart of every child‘ is particularly affecting.
The single ‘Silver Chain’, on which Kurt Vile provides jaunty banjo accompaniment, has the stately driving structure of The National at their least neurotic with the beautiful but mournful melody of recent Sufjan Stevens output. The lyrics have a crucifix at the end of that chain whilst being about travel and the video is full of glistening rivers, shiny railroad tracks and long horizon-seeking roads, making a link between Christ’s death and mans’ freedom.
Roberts music has recently been described as ‘redemptive blues’, but there is none of the bump and grind of the hot delta here, there’s very no bottom end to swing to and no bitter hard luck tales, ending in despair or revenge. No, this is American folk as you used to imagine it – clear eyes, unadorned and devout. This isn’t folky as in the stuff in floaty dresses and wide brimmed hats that seemed manufactured in the noughties to sell you mobile phones – this is the music of the people, and of the land.
Painfully honest and admirably single minded, Luke Roberts sounds like a man with his shit together on Sunlit Cross, and that’s pretty cool, however he got there.
