ALBUM REVIEWS
|
|
ALBUM REVIEWS |
|
Malcolm Middleton
SLEIGHT OF HEART FULL TIME HOBBY 3.03.08 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk Good old Malky. He can take a Madonna song (Stay) and turn it into a mawkish dirge as easily as he can take a set of miserable lyrics of his own and set them to a jaunty melody then sing “at times like this I know that I am….. the happiest man”. Malcolm Middleton’s remarkably successful and bouncy A Brighter Beat album had me captivated with it’s pop mastery. Now, apparently, he is wrapping up his “boohoo / way-hey period” with leftovers from last year’s album and some cover versions. It’s a simpler album, mostly acoustic guitar and the odd bit of ornamentation. Short too, at not much over half and hour but if this was a picture, you’d frame it – a wee piece of art. Outsider art, mind, but little gems like an anthology of ponderings. The opening track has piano and fiddle and a lovely gentle melody rising into a bit of a jog as he runs through the trickier bits of writing songs to order for a new album or whatever. Blue Plastic Bags sees him watching the ‘staying in is the new going out’ crowd and worrying about our daily dependence on alcohol to get us through the night. “We’re all listening to downbeat shite. We overdid the good times, Now we can’t sleep at night.” Total Belief sees Malcolm doing a Woody Allen on his confidence levels and wishing for the end of the world. Jackson C. Frank’s Just Like Anything might attract attention to another under-exposed songwriter. You can see the connection – a gloriously melancholic death-obsessed song. Follow Robin Down is as close to a crowd-pleaser as Malc gets. Our loveable loser more or less wraps it up with his penultimate observation, standing out for the open echoey acoustic it was recorded in: “Love is a lie I’m a liar Love is a lie You’re a liar.” Then contradicts himself: “I’m never going to give you up. Just going to keep lifting you up.” Not just for fans of Arab Strap….. www.malcolmmiddleton.co.uk |