Album Review: Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat - Everything's Getting Older

Since the demise of Arab Strap in 2006 Aidan John Moffat hasn’t exactly been resting on his laurels, having released all manner of solo material under various different guises (including an album of ten short songs remarkably crammed onto a 7” vinyl, no less). Everything’s Getting Older - released through the ever-supportive Glasgow label, Chemikal Underground - sees him team up with fellow Falkirk native Bill Wells, a respected jazz composer whose diverse compositions have been widely praised over the years.
 
Wells embeds a sweet and homely piano on ‘Let’s Stop Here’, while Moffat sings of the biting temptation “to squeeze a fist of hair, to slide my fingers underneath your dress…” when confronted with the reappearance of an object of his teenage desires. Every bit as frank, crass, poetic and humorous as always, in other words. After this, ‘Cages’ is a frantically discordant jazz number, while the aptly-named ‘Ballad of The Bastard’ is an unnervingly soothing confession from a blithe cheater: “I’ll cunningly convince you not to walk away”, slurs our affable protagonist, “I’ll poison your resolve and twist your every thought / I don’t love you - who knows if I ever did?”. It’s not hard at this point to imagine Wells and Moffat slumped in a seedy late-night piano bar, confusing and distressing the drunken barflies.
 
By contrast, ‘The Copper Top’ must go down as one of the most sincere and poignant pieces that Moffat has produced throughout his sixteen years of making records. A spoken-word delivery sees him drinking post-funeral and recounting the story of getting fitted for his three-piece suit, while muted brass and strings swirl around the ether: “Birth, love and death - the only reasons to get dressed up…”.
 
The definitive highpoint on an album full of memorable moments arguably comes in the shape of ‘Glasgow Jubilee’, which typically chronicles the sordid sexual exploits of a cast of rogues that includes a cutthroat prostitute, a soldier, a sleazy manager, a groupie and Moffat himself. Wells serves up a driving funk accompaniment while Moffat spits in his affable Scottish brogue “So she lets him fuck her during lunch, surrenders to his will / Then he fucks off to the pub and she starts fiddling the till”. The man has clearly lost none of his acerbic way with words – surely it’s high time somebody offered him a book deal.
 
The style in which Aidan Moffat writes is uniquely (and crushingly) honest, and yet sadly he hasn’t been as highly-ranked as he probably deserves. This is a fantastic collection of songs and tales which not only reaffirms this Shy Retirer as one of the finest and most original lyricists of these times, but also pairs him with a perhaps unlikely foil in the virtuoso Wells. If Everything’s Getting Older is anything to go by, then two heads are indeed better than one.