Brutally candid, stirringly melodious, second solo outing from moonlighting Arab Strap guitarist
Malcolm Middleton's solo debut, 2002's "5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine, was an exercise in autobiographical introspection that was as bleak as its unwieldy title was difficult to remember. *Into The Woods, its belated follow up, is an equally self-lacerating affair: "You're gonna break my heart I know it/And when you do, I'm gonna run to the country and plug my ears/I'd rather have you than sing these shit songs..." Middleton cautions with typical frankness on opener Break My Heart. Musically, however, this is a quite different animal to both its fragile predecessor and Arab Strap's angsty barstool blues.
Despite his assertions, Middleton's songs are anything but 'merde'. Instead, the album's 12 crisply recorded essays - by turns chiming, urgent and elegiac - revel in a beguiling incongruity, equal parts brusque confession and soaring epiphany. Lyrically dour songs titled Devastation and Loneliness Shines come swathed in glittering electric guitars, euphoric keyboards and unequivocal drumming. "There's nothing weird about hating yourself/When you've seen the hours I've spent / Darkness comes and darkness goes /Just like my good times went", goes the stark, acoustic guitar framed verse of Monday Night Nothing before a sudden, exhilarating rush of piano and power chords instantly transform the mood.
This warts'n'all realism that can't help but reveal its ecstatic soul. And while Middleton's declamatory singing style and unreconstructed Falkirk accent lend genuine grain to narratives of kitchen sink veracity, there's also playful drollery in a delivery which relishes the colloquial and delights in Irn-Bru authenticity and the poetry of the ordinary. "I was just about to carve the turkey and watch Eastenders/Cos' they're my friends and my friends are strangers", notes on the exquisitely desolate Yuletide memoir Burst Noel.
Allegedly inspired by both Dennis Wilson's iconic Pacific Ocean Blue and a six month slough of despondency following a 2001 Arab Strap tour, Middleton marshals his muse with the aid of miscellaneous Caledonian indie eminences plucked from the ranks of Mogwai, The Reindeer Section and the recently split Delgados. Fellow Strapper Aidan Moffat even lends a hand. The arrangements are deceptively meticulous, variously recalling (by way of appropriate reciprocity) Belle And Sebastian's The Boy With The Arab Strap, the Delgados' The Great Eastern and, on the pulsating, electronically enhanced Happy Medium, a clinically depressed Lemon Jelly.
Literate, genuinely provocative modern British guitar music is thin on the ground these days, which makes Into The Woods a welcome revelation and, in a musical age which prizes style over content, an unlikely cause for optimism. On this evidence Malcolm Middleton will soon be describing Arab Strap as his side project. [5/5]
DAVID SHEPPARD
Observer Music Monthly - 22nd May, 2005
You can't help but develop a wee soft spot for Malcolm Middleton. Even when the sometime Arab Strapper sets out to produce a happy album, inspired by Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue, he still writes a song like 'Burst Noel' (sample lyric: 'Lying on the bathroom floor/ I don't wanna ho ho ho no more'). The boy can't help it, he seethes with epic disappointment and it's all laid bare for our voyeuristic scrutiny.
While his morale languishes somewhere in a cold Falkirk bedsit, melodically his songs whoop from mountain peaks. It's an uplifting musical intelligence that coaxes you into treasuring Into the Woods. Despite an eclectic melange of piano, fiddle, cello, and fuzzy guitar, nothing wildly avant-garde happens but it's wrapped in exemplary tunes unsullied by excess. 'Loneliness Shines' is Dinosaur Jr high on the psychedelic euphoria of the Flaming Lips, while 'Modest Bear' squelches like a narcotic robo duet. His voice, which threatens to wobble off-key at any moment, spews forth his interior monologue in a mesmerising burr.
Middleton's deadpan analysis of romantic failure is sharpened with a dark wit. It's not that he has a dyspeptic view of life, more that he stares it in the face with a clear gaze, and the crystal clarity makes for bruised magic.
SARAH BODEN
BBC Collective - 17th June 2005
Songs for your head, heart and feet.
Malcolm Middleton's second solo album is so strong and articulate in its vision, that it thwacks back into place the idea of independent guitar music as honest and expressive. Although lyrics on Into The Woods absurdly mix images of steak McCoys and roaming bears with sustained melancholy, this is a joyously poetic and exuberant album. The pristine and varied production (rising cellos, muted disco thumps, euphoric Creation-era distortion) wraps dour observation in pop sensibility, leaving a record that should strike you joyously in the head, heart and feet. [4/5]
JAMES RUTLEDGE
Playlouder.com - 19th June, 2005
If ever there was a band that believed in setting out their stall straight away, it'd have to be the one that kicked off an album with the peerless line "It was the biggest cock you'd ever seen", wouldn't it? Oh yes indeed, so it shouldn't come as a huge shock that one of Arab Strap - namely Malcolm Middleton, the more carroty-coiffed and less traditionally vocalising half of the pair - chooses to start his second solo album with similar, if slightly less disarming, candour. 'Break My Heart' is, quite simply, a very real contender for Best Opening Track Of 2005, Middleton's persuasive Celtic tones declaring that his latest relationship is needfully doomed, since otherwise it'll both upset his usual strike rate and give him nothing to write about. It's as cynical as 'Song for Whoever', as comical as anything he's done before, and as classically guitar-driven as any of the more formal post-rock greats.
By rights, of course, 'Into The Woods' really ought to go downhill drastically after this, but the fact he maintains such impeccable standards is testament to his own talent and a wise collection of collaborators, primarily whipped from the mighty mob of royalty that is the Chemikal Underground roster. Sometimes, admittedly, he goes a bit ballistic on the obscurity - for instance, we're left hugely puzzled by the rabid insistence of 'No Modest Bear' - and there are moments where proceedings become spectacularly dark even by his previous standards, but none of that prevents this being a thing of joy to behold. In how many other albums this year will the protagonist attempt to smooth matters over with "a thousand steak McCoys", an excellent idea by any reckoning (cheers, 'Devastation'!)? Where else can you hear the literalist cries of "Guitar!" and "Drums." from the Justins be taken to the kind of large and logical conclusion drawn by 'Choir'? And can you name another artist that'd release an elpee in mid-June that not only has a Christmas song on it, but one in which the performer gets stabbed and ends up stoically watching EastEnders as a substitute for being able to catch up with his friends (that'd be 'Burst Noel', then, one of the most inappropriate candidates for The Best Christmas Album In The World... Ever!... ever!)? Actually, if you've got another example as an answer to any of these questions then we'd like to hear it. A lot.
He hasn't exactly skimped on the music either. The turn-of-the-century 'Strappings that really brought Malcolm to the fore may have been characterised by a surfeit of somewhat complex soundscapes, but there's loads here in the way of out-and-out tunes. These often, especially in the case of 'Bear With Me', throb with a vibrantly brooding Caveian grandeur, but occasionally charge down more eyebrow-twitchingly jaunty paths (the superb closer 'A New Heart' springs to mind). Then, Malcolm touches on incongruously bright and utterly chart-chiselling alt.pop territory ('A Happy Medium', duetted with the Reindeer Section's Jenny Reeve and a profound exercise in being cheerfully miserable) and, best of all, gives terrific blasts of troubled techno along the lines of Arabian jewel 'Trippy' (yes, that's 'Monday Night Nothing', another standout). Hell, even the swearing's fantastic. In short, 'Into The Woods' is a real revelation, and a profoundly lovable record in its entirety. Charlotte Hatherley may have raised the bar by an outrageous amount for strummers trying their hand alone, but she's got herself a cracker of a bar companion at last. [4.5/5]
IAIN MOFFAT