Album Review: Everything's Getting Older by Bill Wells

Everything’s Getting Older – you’d be excused for getting a sense of déjà vu from this title if you’ve kept up with Aidan Moffat’s music as half of Arab Strap. Aging is a theme he’s explored since the group’s inception fifteen years ago (when he was in his early twenties), but never as convincingly as on this record. As usual, Moffat reels off uncomfortably sexual monologues in his sung/spoken Scots drawl, but with more self-consciousness than before.

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Seek out a physical copy of this album and the first thing you will be transfixed by, before even a note is played, is the deliberately distorted and mocked-up portraits of Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat (Assuming, of course, that the album proper will be a facsimile of the promotional copy. If not, the next few hundred words are a bit of a waste. If that’s the case, skip to the score or something, I dunno).

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Somehow an Aidan Moffat album starting out with a piano part courtesy of collaborator and longtime Glasgow music fixture Bill Wells that could almost be Lionel Richie and Diana Ross' "Endless Love" seems weirdly appropriate. It doesn't quite stay like that, but Wells' shift to include brushed drums and acoustic bass atmospheres doesn't change the fundamental sense of the duo finding a split between elegant melancholy in and of itself and, courtesy of Moffat's lyrics, often vivisecting what the ideas of it could be. It's something Moffat's long been interested in, so to have the first song with vocals, "Let's Stop Here," tackle ideas of teenage fantasy, adult possibility, and rejecting a one-off experience while still struggling with the idea of it, is only apt.

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Now married with a child, Aidan Moffat ruminates on love and mortality here, rather than on just limp, soggy cocks. “It’s all shopping lists and school runs, direct debits and tax credits, nasal hair, fungal nail infections, dishwasher tablets, Citalopram and CBeebies”, he broods on the brilliant, nerve-touching [b]‘Cages’[/b], backed by Scottish jazz man Bill Wells’ minimal, heart-rending piano and skittish percussion.He calls love and life as it really is: occasionally sweet, rarely trouble-free and often so suicidally routine we could all become the man he speaks of on [b]‘Ballad Of The Bastard’[/b].Chris ParkinOrder a copy of Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells’ ‘Everything’s Getting Older’ from Amazon .

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Moffat’s characteristic honesty and intensity combines with Wells’ tender compositions. Reef Younis 2011 "Everything’s Getting Older." You can almost hear Aidan Moffat sigh, quietly repeating it, muttering it with an embittered acceptance. As a serial miserablist, his ability to convey a venomous dissatisfaction is unparalleled, seemingly happy to sink into the role of the archetypal wretched bastard.

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