The Night Is Advancing

The final Appendix Out album is their most ambitious collection of songs and arrangements, by a good stretch. Bringing in Sean O’Hagan of The High Llamas and Drag City’s Rian Murphy as producers, Alasdair Roberts and his group aim for something more expansive than before – though there’s an interesting tension in evidence here, between Roberts’s increasing focus on British traditional song, and Appendix Out’s grounding in lo-fi/independent music. The more spectral it gets, the better, from the ghostly manifestations of the opening “Path To Our Beds,” to the distended waves of drone in “Fortified Jackdaw Grove.” The Night is Advancing is full of spiralling details and sidereal interventions, such that even the more straightforward, folksier moments, like “Groves of Lebanon”, feel inhabited by invisible forces.