Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – How to Get to Heaven From Scotland
After so loving Aidan Moffat’s superlative, jarring I Can Hear Your Heart, I was looking forward to this, but with a little trepidation. It couldn’t be as good, could it? And no, it couldn’t, unfortunately.
The problem really is the music. The lyrics are as sharp and impactful as ever, although not quite so manically focussed on betrayal and misery this time around. This is something of a mercy actually, as that did become a little bleak after a while. Here the subject matter is almost inevitably a little more diverse, which is good, with songs like The Atheist’s Lament a particularly welcome topic for an incresingly hardened non-believer such as myself.
Others broach Moffat’s own domestic situation. Where I Can Hear Your Heart was hidden behind layers of artifice, you get the impression that this album comes a lot more unfiltered. This comes from the presence of songs like Lullaby For an Unborn Child, and the presumably rather wry Now I Know I’m Right, both much more early Tuesday evening kitchen-sinkers than grandiloquent proclamations.
For all these charms, however, this album does not, for me, really succeed as a record and it is down to the music. I know that sounds facile, but Moffat’s poetic talents actually rescue a couple of songs from the slide into the ordinary, and that trick can’t be repeated ad infinitum. Basically, a lot of the melodies lack invention and the actual musical framework lacks zip. It’s actually kind of sluggish.
It would be entirely wrong to infer from this that this that I think this is a crap album, because it isn’t: there are some great moments. Oh Men! is an obvious one, witty and boisterous, Unsent Letter, Unborn Child, Big Blonde – there are a few. But ultimately, for all it may contain some superb ingredients, there is enough lacking from this particular record that I can’t really recommend it as much as I hoped I would be able to.
Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Oh Men!
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Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Ballad of the Unsent Letter
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