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“This is shit, and that is shit, and being shit is great.” Good to see that Malc is his usual cheery, fun-packed self. After years playing with Aidan Moffat in Scotch indie miserablist-heroes Arab Strap Middleton has now released four albums, that is if you include this one? The nine-songs here were conceived during the recording of MalMid’s last album 'A Brighter Beat', and while that smacks of a cash-in, it’s only when you take into account the unlikelihood of MaMi selling enough records to break even that you realise that this record is more than likely pure of aim.
Following on from the (slightly) lifted mood of his last record MM’s tunes here are sung with a valium smile; real hope is for idiots after all. He is showing no sign of ditching the melancholy altogether, it’s too much a part of what he’s about, but the self-consciousness of previous efforts has been replaced by measured contentment or at least acceptance that things are getting better.
“It’s easy hating yourself, it’s hard making it rhyme,” he reasons in deceptively chirpy opener ‘The Week’. He’s got a point. It’s easy to me miserable, but it’s fooking hard to do it well. It’s the audacity of releasing an album of songs taken from the sessions of another record, complete with three Malcolmised covers that cements this new-found confidence. He knows that he can do miserable well and he’s showing off by being less miserable.
Sleight Of Heart has drinking anger: ‘Blue Plastic Bags’, love anger: ‘Love Comes In Waves’, and even Madonna anger: ‘Stay’. He claims King Creosote’s ‘Marguerita Red’ and Jackson C. Frank’s ‘Just Like Anything’ for his own and there is still enough time to slip in a few numbers aching with Jenny Reeve’s crying violin.
You get the feeling he could knock these songs out in his sleep, but therein lies the charm of this record. It has none of the care of his previous records but somehow sounds more genuine for it.
