Send "Luke Roberts " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Big Bells and Dime Songs, Luke Roberts' debut LP, was released by Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace in the spring of 2010; after a limited run, it received a relatively grander rollout this fall via Thrill Jockey. While the record wasn't reissued, exactly, Big Bells' unveiling was gradual-- which feels like a particularly appropriate beginning for Roberts, a deliberate and unhurried folk singer from Nashville.On first listen, Big Bells and Dime Songs can seem slight-- Roberts' guitar and vocals aren't augmented by much, save the occasional snare, some bass, or a snippet of electric organ or piano-- but their sparseness only amplifies the record's pervasive, echoing sadness. Big Bells is preoccupied with failures, emotional or otherwise: These are faithless laments, dirges for the nights when your glass is empty and no one's coming over. Roberts' vocals (which contain all the cackle of J Mascis and all the plaintiveness of Townes Van Zandt) are tender and bruised, and their smallness can be legitimately heartbreaking-- like on opener "Somewhere to Run", where Roberts blithely offers himself as a kind of last-call solace ("I'll be a hand to hold/ If I'm just a drunk who can't be true," he half-sings). Although folk music is frequently defined by its focus on narrative, Roberts' lyrics can be purposefully ambiguous, if not fully absurd ("I'm on a boat/ And if I only float," he announces in "Unspotted Clothes"). Still, his oddball storytelling is unusually well-matched by his slow, methodical strums, and these songs move with purpose. The message is buried somewhere in all that empty space....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Nashville’s Luke Roberts explains the songs on his debut album, Big Bells and Dime Songs, like so: “They were poems that I didn’t feel comfortable not reciting before I go.” That attitude gives you a good sense of Roberts’ classic ethos: a folk musician in the most romantic sense, a writer who submits his verses to an acoustic guitar rather than an obscure literary journal. In other words, Roberts follows in a long (long, long) tradition of Country & Western-infused fingerpickers, laying his plaintive voice and road-borne laments to tape out of a need for confessional self-expression. If that’s your flavor, Big Bells and Dime Songs should deliver. Roberts is utterly uninterested in re-inventing the wheel with his music, but he puts his creative talents toward honing a specific sound, instead—and he does it quite well. These nine tracks roll by with an understated grandeur, something like the feeling that must come with the train travel depicted on the record’s cover. When Roberts titles a song “All American”, he’s not kidding. That song, featuring lines like, “You’re gonna do / Whatever you feel is right / I’m gonna do / Whatever is my right / It’s all-American,” serves as an ode to the freewheeling, individual-centric American spirit—you know, the John Wayne one. Or the Johnny Cash one; the Louis L’Amour one. Romanticizing American individualism has fallen out of fashion in the indie-rock world (and since that community is still tethered, however delicately and dissolutely now, to the punk community, it makes sense in our tough times), but it makes sense for a musician tied to the Nashville sounds of decades past to make the idea sound palatable once again....full text |
| Boomkat |
| *Debut album of naturally gauged modern bluegrass, plain and simple, driven by canny machine-rhythms.** "I was born into a charismatic-nondenominational family in Nashville, TN.. My mother sang hymns and spoke in tongues. My dad played bluegrass. I hopped trains for the first when I was eleven years old under the Ben Allen bridge in East Nashville. At thirteen I was sent to live with my father in Cuhllowhee, NC. Neglected to be enrolled in school, I spent the year running through the backwoods of my father's government-housing-cabin. Soon I ran away from home and traveled around the United States on Greyhounds and trains, looking to start a band. In olympia, 2004 I formed hardcore band Spread Eagle 1979 with Judd Taylor of Sex Vid and filmmaker Brittany Pisano releasing two live cassette albums and a video. Over the past few years, inspired by folk and world music, I focused on the guitar and writing songs of my own. My greatest influences being southern folk, Delta and Appalachian Blues, I bought a pair of white shoes and moved back to the South. This past year, I have written and recorded my first collection of songs entitled, "Big Bells and Dime Songs", recruiting Kyle Spence of Harvey Milk to back me in his studio in Athens, GA.." Luke Roberts, April 2010."...full text |
Luke Roberts lyrics
|
| |||||||
