Aye, we cast our ballot this way every year, you know. It's not partisanship either, but a genuine hunch on our part. But this year, you and everyone else can punch Alasdair Roberts for Scots Singer of the year in the 2012 MG Alba Scottish Traditional Music Awards. Fuck a president - whether tradding the boards as a solo singer or and collabing with the likes of Jackie Oates, Karine Polwart and Mairi Morrison, or preseneting brand-spanking new materials like the stuff-of-epochs found all throughout the forthcoming album, A Wonder Working Stone, Alasdair is the king of the song-sung-Scottish, a master of Brogue'n English. This year, your voot's dead important - so don't be a ned, just click here and roll up to question 11, then check the box that says Alasdair Roberts. There! Now the world's a better place.

Like we said, Alasdair Roberts & Friends' A Wonder Working Stone hits in January, 2012 (22/01/13 - put it in yuir palm pilot!), and it's a boom. A collection of new epics from his very own pen (and the ink of many ancestors), Alasdair's latest is by turns metaphysical, cosmological, phantasmagorical, topical, personal and universal. But don't take it from us, put your eye to the words of a countryman, the poet Robin Roberston:

"Alasdair Roberts writes new songs that seem to be hundreds of years old. He also sings songs that are hundreds of years old but sound like they were written yesterday. He is the most exciting young musician currently working within the folk tradition of these islands and is, in my opinion, a kind of genius.

A restless, endlessly inventive imagination, Roberts is a protean artist, his solo records moving from early economy to something denser and more allusive. Each song carries in it the depth of his learning, the range of his curiosity, but also the compulsion to create something new and lasting. A Wonder Working Stone shows the artist moving forward again – through myth and magic, through loss and anger and longing, from the cheery invitation to the ‘The Merry Wake’ to the stately, doom-laden lament ‘The Laverock in the Blackthorn’ – to add to a body of work that is both crucial and beautiful."