Pitchfork

Listen closely to the tail end of the first verse of Alasdair Roberts' "Where Twines the Path" and you can hear something that shouldn't be there: An empty promise. "When the map and fact mismatch, I will burn the map," claims Roberts above an acoustic guitar, sounding like a perfect gentleman but lying like a playboy. Roberts is arguing for self-reliance and adventure, vouching for a little transcendental wisdom in a trance-happy world. This could be an anthem. Instead, it's the moment that explains Roberts' fourth LP, The Amber Gatherers: He wouldn't dare burn anything. At best, he'd (politely) ask the map to set itself on fire. Then he'd relish in the glow of the fire's flicker.

Roberts is obsessed with human frailty and manmade failure. On opener "Riddle Me This", he bemoans the man-led denigration of nature; he takes hopeful love and turns it into an old-world murder ballad starring cheating, jealousy, and bribery for "The Cruel War". But Roberts seems too cool and collected for these songs' good: He's the vigilant reporter watching things go up in smoke, then looking for an allegory. Only 29, he's a smart, seasoned writer and arranger, turning subtle tricks with alternate guitar tunings (on 11 songs, he uses 11 tunings, dropping the low E string all the way to an F). He couples complex internal and external rhymes more often than not, and he commands expansive mythological and geographical vocabularies. During the beaming "River Rhine", for instance, Roberts uses his native Scotland's Clyde River as a symbol of supplication. Compared to his lover's majestic Rhine, his Clyde is inferior. "Where does the Rhine rise? It rises in her eyes," he sings, a resplendent six-string acoustic and the backing shimmer of an electric making the whole thing shine. He's cleverly enamored, and that's endearing.

But that's not the case with at least eight of 11 tracks here, not that you'd know it on first listen: When Roberts turns his pen and his band to more somber material, his sonic approach is achingly consistent. "Let Me Lie and Bleed Awhile" closes with the suggestion of redemption, but the entire song-- lyrically, all black imagery and innocence botched-- sounds like business as usual. Roberts writes about downfall and return, but his derma-brazed presentations make him sound like he's nothing but stable.

These, of course, are questions addressing the equilibrium between folk preservation and progress. Roberts isn't a traditionalist. He's too dependent on punchy rock dynamics and stick-to-snare percussion for the purists. But he does play his cards close to the vest, trading in the empirical, map-burning adventure of "Where Twines the Path" for observations behind a glass wall. The Amber Gatherer doesn't need to be louder or more aggressive. It just needs to be less perfect in order to suggest that Roberts isn't spinning yarns or singing fables he read somewhere. The 30-year-old Josh Ritter musses up folk forms to emerge breathing equal parts fire and flair, while sexagenarian Vashti Bunyan musses the idiom just enough to claim it as her own.

But not Roberts: During "I Had a Kiss of the King's Hand", "The King" emerges from the sea, and Roberts is the Samaritan narrator. He shows attention, kisses the King's hand, and is rewarded with a barrel of the King's wine. But the entire saga is treated as though such sights are common. If it was a bit less blasé, it could be a corollary to the beatitudes. Here and elsewhere, though, Roberts sounds neither damaged nor repaired and fighting back. And when you're trying to show a crowd what it's like to reckon with dangerous seas, cruel skies and unforgiving lands, it's important to show the scars-- or at least pretend you have them.