Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton’s first album together since 2005 is as brilliant as ever – a mischievous, brooding, blackly humorous, whisperingly sinister and sweary exploration of love, sex, addiction, exploitation and death wrapped in beautiful, poetic music. Perhaps it is best summed up on Tears on Tour, in which Moffat, describes numerous scenarios in which he finds himself weeping, sometimes at family tragedy, sometimes at very little, and how he would like to be “the opposite of a comedian” telling “tales of woe” and at each performance selling high quality cotton handkerchiefs with embroidered tour dates. It’s one of his many fantastically gallows humour deliveries on this album which begins with a love song for older people, in which the narrator describes, in a backdrop of lovely sounds, coitus and putrefying corpses conjoined as if he and his love are amorous zombies – The Turning of Our Bones (previously highlighted on our New Songs section). But that’s perhaps the least dark of these many grim but wonderfully vivid numbers. Sleeper is an extraordinary depiction of someone slipping into deeper addiction through the prism of a passenger train passing through ever darker stations. I Was Once A Weak Man comes from the perspective of a sleazebag, who preys on young girls and ends with a caustic shot at a certain senior figure of British rock and pop. Fable of the Urban Fox is a tragic allegory of immigrants seeking a home in the city. With an exquisite acoustic guitar backing by Middleton Another Clockwork Day is about the routine of a porn addict, and Here Comes Comus!, with catchy dark indie pop sound, is a very sinister ode to the god of festivity and night activity where evil knows no bounds. There’s no better combination of artists to capture the the persistent penumbra of present times. Out on Rock Action Records.
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