Aidan Moffat has always seemed older than his years. Even his first album with Arab Strap, The Week Never Starts Round Here, felt drawn from an acerbic place in someone with a few more creases in their brow. Moffat was in his early twenties around then, and has since made a career by siphoning his unseemly soliloquies into song. The aging process has often been on his mind throughout; the opening verse from "The Night Before the Funeral" from Arab Strap's 1998 record Philophobia reads: "Too drunk and getting old." Now he's teamed up with a fellow veteran of the Scottish music world, multi-instrumentalist Bill Wells, to really hammer that point home by titling this record Everything's Getting Older. The duo may have sprouted a few new gray hairs during its making, as the album took some eight years of sporadic recording to reach completion.
Much of this record documents Moffat's attempts to reconcile his past and present lives. "Let's Stop Here" sets the tone by having him fend off the advances of a former object of his desire, principally due to the fact that he's settled down. But Moffat is happy to show off his fallibility, noting that a younger version of himself is still ticking away inside somewhere, possibly anguishing over his actions as he utters the title of the song. Wells demonstrates his versatility throughout-- "Let's Stop Here" is all somber, violin-driven balladry, while the following "Cages" is propelled by urgent piano stabs. The latter acutely captures Moffat's current mindset, with reminisces of his lifestyle from Arab Strap's "The First Big Weekend" coupled with words on the wretched mundanity of his present existence. Even Moffat's beloved watering holes are aging-- "the pub's once brilliant copper roof has oxidized over the years and now it's a dull, pastel green," he muses in "The Copper Top".
So Moffat is pretty much where you'd expect him to be as he settles into his late thirties, plagued by innumerable doubts and insecurities. Where Everything's Getting Older loses focus is in the desire of the two players to constantly canter through great stylistic shifts. Perhaps that's not surprising considering the long gestation period of this material. It's been patched together over vast stretches of time, and it shows. Moffat sounds like he's struggling to find his place in the disjointed rhythms of "A Short Song to the Moon" and the lite-funk riffing of "Glasgow Jubilee". It's when the pair keeps it simple that they stumble upon a space in which they can operate effectively. The basic piano backing of "Ballad of the Bastard" and "The Copper Top" afford Moffat plenty of room to sink into his particular brand of lyrical discomfort, helping both tracks to become wonderfully drab centerpieces to the album.
After those peaks this sags into a marginal piece from both players. The lost spy-thriller theme "Dinner Time" and the stripped-down "The Sadness in Your Life Will Slowly Fade" are Moffat on autopilot, straining for insight. In the latter he circles back to the album's predominant theme, recalling another night out that made him feel old. But 10 songs into the record, we've now already got the point. Perhaps that's the idea, with Moffat keen to cast himself as an aging bellyacher slumped over the bar, recalling his youth and cursing his advancing years until someone hears him out. It's easy to romanticize such a figure after a one-off encounter, but here it feels like you're being forced to spend time with him on a daily basis. Fortunately Moffat is able to move beyond that with the last two tracks, which find him looking to the future as a father, albeit one with an inclination toward creepy lullabies in "And So Must We Rest". It's just a shame he could only chance upon scattered moments of inspiration while coming to uneasy terms with aging elsewhere on Everything's Getting Older.
