A self-titled record often has special significance, particularly halfway through a career, and Alasdair Roberts contains ten new songs, written in the unique style Alasdair Roberts’ record company describes as “syncretic” – i.e. the bringing together of opposing philosophies. This is a typically esoteric term for songs that are stark but melodic, steeped in mystery yet telling universal stories, flickering between the dark and the light.

Alasdair Roberts compels from the first track to the last, pulling the listener into a strange world of honour, fate, poison, relics, love and magick. This album is stripped back, relying on Roberts’ distinctive, soft Scottish voice and finger-picked acoustic guitar. Its predecessor, A Wonder Working Stone, was a rich set of multi-instrumental collaborations. Here, while Alex Neilson’s The Crying Lion vocal quartet lends occasional backing vocals, elsewhere instrumentation is minimal – a tin whistle, a clarinet – but full of impact.

The album opens as it means to go on with ‘The Way Unfavoured’, a tribute to an unnamed woman, a wild lover who will “Be wayward/Between the nursery and the noose”, and a violent unwise man. A dark story brings no conclusion, but a sense of foreboding. The tone is set, and Roberts’ serves up a succession of songs that seem to have been written in a different century, stories drifting in and out of focus, told in antiquated but precise language. They are beautiful and very, very odd.

‘The Problem of Freedom’ sees Roberts dive off the deep end of his range, his stalking bass strings echoing ominously. On ‘Artless One’, achingly gorgeous harmonies break out, while ‘Hurricane Brown’, already a concert classic, is sung on an ascending register, panic rising as the “long nimble fingers of the three fatal sisters are viciously twisting the future away.”

‘The Final Diviner’ is reminiscent of Dick Gaughan’s epic, humanist folk ballads, both in the strength of the finger-picking and in Roberts’ determination to “Lay the toys of warfare down/Yet still arise and be victorious.” However, Roberts infuses a layer of mysticism, accompanied by a rudimentary percussion, a tapping of sticks that sounds like an incantation. ‘This Uneven Thing’ is perhaps the album’s highlight, revealing the personal among the symbols and the lore. Roberts sings with both tenderness and menace “Had I known before we parted/That love would be this uneven thing/I’d have locked it up in a box of iron/Chained it down with a leaden ring.”

At moments during Alasdair Roberts and on many of his earlier albums, Roberts seems to command time. He draws a thread of pure, dark, medieval Scots culture through into the 21st century with a skill and authenticity that is eerie, captivating and utterly original. In a connected world where alternative is mainstream by definition, Roberts sits apart, reviving tradition and reinventing music we think we understand, making it astonishing and strange.

Alasdair Roberts is available from amazon & iTunes.