First things first. Alasdair Roberts writes songs with titles like "The Way Unfavoured," "Honour Song" and "The Problem of Freedom," and that's only the first three cuts. I suppose that, technically speaking, Roberts is a singer-songwriter, but today, when apparently just about anybody can be a singer-songwriter, that doesn't begin to characterize what Roberts is up to.

Not long ago, the British critic Colin Irwin offered the wry observation that Roberts' songs are the sort of thing best heard on a long, unaccompanied road trip to Alaska. To be clear, this was in the context of a favorable review. What he meant is that you don't put on a Roberts CD as background music. His is the kind of approach ordinarily called "demanding," and it certainly isn't for everybody.

It is, however, for me and the other cultists in the gradually expanding following. Roberts, Scottish and deeply so, is a youngish artist, abundantly, uniquely, and idiosyncratically talented. You can drop Robert Burns and Bob Dylan into any sentence that mentions his name without exposing yourself as a chump. Burns is a predecessor who fashioned poetry out of Scotland's native music, and Dylan is the one who made it possible for songwriters to expand their lyric vocabulary into the dense and obscure without lapsing into the incoherent (if sometimes drawing perilously close). If Roberts doesn't sound like either of these masters, the influence of another Scottish folk-revival writer-musician, the estimable Robin Williamson, is inescapable; the above-cited "Honour Song" is a case in point. Of course, Williamson's writing skills constitute a very high bar. Still, Roberts leaps over that bar and lights out for his own territory.

In contrast to his previous solo disc, A Wonder Working Stone (which I reviewed in this space on 23 March 2013), the new, eponymous disc lays bare a significantly more skeletal sound. Complexly orchestrated in the Baroque-folk manner, Stone is properly credited to "Alasdair Roberts & Friends." Most of the instruments on Alasdair Roberts are courtesy of Roberts, who never overdoes it. He relies primarily on acoustic guitar, with occasional coloring by Donald Lindsay (tin whistles) and Alex South (clarinets). A harmony group weighs in, always lightly, here and there. By Roberts' standards this makes for an unusually accessible album, whereas Stone was top-heavy with songs of daunting length. The shortest was 5:36, the longest 9:38. In the present instance, every song but one clocks in the 3:30 to 4:30 range.

Though you may not catch as much on casual hearing -- no appreciation of Roberts's work is "casual" -- the songs are set to splendid and sturdy melodies. Roberts' knowledge of traditional Scottish and Scottish-diaspora songs borders the encyclopedic, as his occasional CDs of old ballads -- the most recent of them the gorgeous 2012 release Urstan, with Gaelic singer Mairi Morrison -- attest memorably. On the current recording, snatches of melody and lyric echoes of everything from "Derry Jail" to "Fair & Tender Ladies" abound. "This Uneven Thing" practically amounts to a response to the latter, a beloved Appalachian lyric folk song derived from a fragment of the larger narrative of "Waly Waly" aka "The Water is Wide."

Roberts' art collapses time, blurring antique and contemporary into an organic entity patched together from whatever is usable in Scottish (and other) experience. That is the subject of the closing cut, the boldly anthemic "Roomful of Relics," its melody adapted from the traditional "Farewell to the Creeks."

The men have withdrawn and left me alone
Left me alone in a roomful of relics
They've handed down no sceptre, no crown
No robe, no clothing angelic
But they gave me the song, so I carry the song.

Could a songwriter's creed be more ambitious? Or -- perhaps closer to the point -- more noble?