(Blues, Alternative, Folk) Phillip Roebuck - The Alpine Butterfly - 2013, MP3, 320 kbps

American singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Phillip Roebuck has long been an outsider of the music world. Even in the one-man band community where Roebuck is well known and admired, he stands apart from the rest, just he and the old five-string banjo he built from various scraps and a curious, if not slightly ingenious drum apparatus he also made himself. Instead he exists on a level somewhere between the far underground and the surface crust of obscure music, the great crossroads, at the dusty center of which he continuously defies musical tradition and the standards by which such things are typically weighed and measured. That is not to suggest that he hasn’t any respect for traditional music. It’s quite to the contrary, actually, as he pays homage to it and its brilliant progenitors with his unique style, for which he has obviously dug deep into the sounds of old, such as Delta blues and Appalachian folk. But Phillip Roebuck exists in the present, after all, where he has somehow added the energy and intensity of punk rock and the wildly experimental edge of alternative music to his old-timey roots foundation. An original style, to be sure, this unlikely marriage of old and new world music, which, let’s be honest, makes for a rather unusual structure of sound, more like a rickety shotgun shack in the sweltering, insect-bitten deep south than a post-modern highrise in any take-your-pick downtown of any gray metropolis.