A.J.

ROACH may announce himself as being from Edinburgh, Scotland, these days but the voice he does it in remains the cumulative product of generations of Virginians, raised mostly in the church but not above a little off-the-books private enterprise. It's a voice that lends almost unshakeable authority to the songs Roach sings, although Granddaddy, for one, also rings true because Roach researchers know that his grandfather really did operate an illicit liquor trade and his own personal, small-scale mint.

An 'old soul in a young man's body' tone is only part of Roach's singing strength. As he soared off in praise of the night sky as seen from a Caribbean island on Barrio Moon or lamented humans' inability to learn from history on Pleistocene, the title track from his superb latest album, he hit strings of pure notes of which a choirboy would have been proud. Well, a choirboy who had a mischievous streak. Like his fellow Glasgow Americana guest Eliza Gilkyson, he can even add a "whistling" solo and make it sound like an instrument. Roach's subjects aren't always wholesome and his characters aren't always innocent but sitting with just his guitar for company and occasionally singing a cappella and using the room's acoustics to fullest effect, he showed that rare ability to transport the listener to the heart of the action, whether it be the San Francisco streets he once drove around as a cabbie, or his mentor, New York folkie Jack Hardy's Greenwich Village intimate songwriting workshops, or the "domestic" he conjures up in his allegorical marriage of a merman and a sea lion.

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