By Lynn Rapoport

IT WAS A strange week as far as pop cultural consumption went. I watched Olivier Assayas's Web-porn horror film Demonlover, followed the governor's race, and made the ill-advised decision to buy Details' "power issue," featuring yet another cover shot of a greased-up Justin Timberlake. Coming home at night, I lay down and dreamed alongside five new songs from the bedroom recordings of Iron and Wine and the complete works of Alasdair Roberts, trying to forget my poor consumer choices. Having recently celebrated yet another birthday, I was feeling troubled by the vague recollection of a purer era when I wore long, terrible hippie skirts, didn't watch TV, carried around a dog-eared songbook of traditional Child ballads, and could recite sections of Wordsworth's Prelude by heart. I listened to Roberts's newest album, Farewell Sorrow (Drag City), which offers, if not an end to sadness, an opportunity for leaving behind the unsettling present.

Since 1997, Roberts has released three albums under the band name Appendix Out and two under his own name (with many of the same musicians). His music calls to mind old ballads and hunting songs, the stuff of British Isles folk tales threaded into the lyrics – wild beasts and old forests and battlegrounds, soldiers and knives and women who "wear the guise of fallow doe" or change into goslings before a hunting man's awed, astonished eyes. Looking far past the rock 'n' roll era, he unabashedly describes a terrain we've pretty much left behind, dealing in language we no longer use much, themes we have trouble mentioning in earnest: true love and bridal beds, the downfall of heroes, the death of friends, ardent admiration for the natural world. From a saturation standpoint, Web porn and Justin may be winning as usual in modern life, but Roberts doesn't sound like he cares.

I couldn't have explained this while wearing thin Appendix Out's first album, The Rye Bears a Poison (Drag City), and I didn't feel quite the same way about the three others that came between it and Farewell Sorrow. But one of the most engaging aspects of the new album is the degree to which Roberts leaves behind the world here, placing himself among the old stories that fascinate him and singing to his listeners from there. He plays make-believe, writing himself and his friends and lovers into history. The press notes on Farewell Sorrow mention Roberts's descent from a line of royal gamekeepers, and on the pretty, engaging second track, "Join Our Lusty Chorus," Roberts takes the part of a poacher in royal parkland and sweetly, disarmingly begs a gamekeeper who shares his name to spare his life "though I bagged a brace of fine hare in your forest." In the final stanza he calls on his fellows to "follow the musical horn," and among his companions are the musicians who accompany Roberts on the album – Gareth Eggie, Tom Crossley, and Rian Murphy, who produced Farewell Sorrow as well as Appendix Out's The Night Is Advancing (Drag City, 2001).

Though I recognize with most of my brain that they are, after all, just songs he's writing, Farewell Sorrow's submersion in the distant past – and my constant difficulty separating songwriting fictions from reality – makes it hard for me to imagine Roberts showing up for tour dates. And yet, luckily, he'll be visiting San Francisco with his band this week, setting up on the tiny Hemlock Tavern stage to serenade an audience of living, breathing appreciators of folk rock and Drag City artists. And after all, however we choose to voice or suppress these ideas now, the idioms he takes from old ballads articulate timeless problems of life and love and work and death, emotional states that aren't all that time-bound.

The title track begins with a bitter account of kindred "tricked by Death," struck down on a battlefield where blood ran thickly hundreds of years ago. "I've stuck a knife in a man for less, but death is not so easily defeated," Roberts sings, then turns to musing on life and death's tight intertwinings in a conclusion in which joy and sorrow are intertwined in turn. Other people sing about death's tireless pursuit of life, though the battlefields tend to be hospitals or city streets or ordinary rooms in unnamed houses. Here the battlefields are battlefields, the kind where young men are slaughtered in the flower of their youth, as Roberts might put it.

It's a history lesson or an old tapestry made into song, but the centuries somehow creep together after all because Roberts is there. The home in the joyous, pastoral love song "The Whole House Is Singing" is surely his; the girl who sings and calls him by name is surely his, too. It's just that the music is from somewhere else as well, and the rhythms and words rise from the floorboards of a place lived in centuries ago. As long as Roberts remembers what it looked like, the song remains much the same.