David Ian Roberts: Travelling Bright
Cambrian Records

“I'm trying to paint the inside of my mind onto the outside world,” says Cardiff-based singer-songwriter David Ian Roberts. Certainly this wonderful, ambitious album, recorded in Penarth and issued on the Welsh Cambrian Records imprint, brings that desire to fruition splendidly. In contrast to the label's all-instrumental Toby Hay releases (2017's The Gathering and, with Jim Ghedi, 2018's The Hawksworth Grove Sessions), Travelling Bright is largely a vocal-based affair, though two instrumentals also appear. The recording, available in CD, digital, and double-LP formats, is best experienced as a whole, especially when its twelve parts form a pastoral suite that establishes parallels between nature-based phenomena-—wind, sea, sky, winter, sunsets, and the like—and inner states of being. One imagines Roberts spent many an hour communing with nature and drawing inspiration from it during the recording's formative stages.

Credited with vocals, guitars (acoustic, electric, slide, twelve-string), bass, dulcimer, autoharp, organ, drums, kalimba, and more, Roberts is in full multi-instrumentalist mode, but Kirstie Miller on cello, Daan Temmink on piano, and Aidan Thorne on double bass also prove invaluable to the presentation. Roberts' soft vocal delivery (in places multi-tracked) predictably invites a Nick Drake comparison, even if their voices aren't terribly alike otherwise; Drake, Bert Jansch, and Elliott Smith are, however, cited as inspirations, and even a single listen-through reveals evidence of their impact. Without wishing to diminish the contributions of the guests, Travelling Bright is fundamentally a solo album, written, arranged, and recorded by Roberts alone, and as such it bears worth noting how convincingly he simulates a full ensemble's playing. There's nothing clumsy about his execution of that sleight-of-hand.

“A Million Winds” introduces the album on a note of measured uplift, with his soft voice rising from a lustrous field of acoustic sounds that itself gains strength as other elements emerge, the music growing ever muscular and radiant. “Sending Out Fires” lifts the spirits with jaunty rhythms and melodies that exude a slight Simon & Garfunkel character as much as anything UK folk-based. Roberts' pastoral folk persona comes to the fore in “Lulling a Greener Man,” which, with its wedding of strings and acoustic guitar, testifies to his considerable talent as songwriter and arranger. The beautifully crafted instrumentals “Carillon,” its entrancing effect deepened by Miller's front-line presence, and “Winter Sun,” a brief guitar tapestry, bring that pastoral character into even sharper relief. He has a jones for mythical content, too, as indicated by the lyrical imagery running through “The Holloway” and the presumably Hermann Hesse-inspired “Glass Bead Game.”

February 2019