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*** Appendix Out

THE NIGHT IS ADVANCING

(Drag City)

This Glasgow indie-rock trio deliver their stately folkish songs with a pacing that echoes cart wheels rolling on rutted tracks and peasants wielding scythes in wheatfields at harvest time. But on their third album for Drag City, Appendix Out do move ever so slightly on from the minimalist arrangements of their debut album toward a fuller sound, away of the pastoral 19th-century feel of their first two releases and toward something more contemporary. Singer Ali Roberts’s mild, quivery voice nestles into the band’s slow-moving guitars and deliberate drumming. And he still writes somewhat arcane lyrics that allude to things like jackdaws.

His bandmates, flutist/keyboardist Tom Crossley and guitarist/percussionist Gareth Eggie, with a little help from producers Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas and Rian Murphy of Chestnut Station, bring a more modern post-rock edge to the songs. The notion of synthesizers humming and buzzing around Roberts’s cryptic olde-school incantations (“All ships must rest now . . . or else be burnt for firewood”) may at first seem a little odd. But that’s part of the charm and appeal of The Night Is Advancing.

— Lois Maffeo