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Gig Review

Aidan Moffat / Human Don’t Be Angry (Malcolm Middleton)
Sheffield, Library Theatre

Article written by Matt H - Mar 13, 2011

Aidan Moffat

Sheffield is tetchy. The conference and its attendant inconvenience is in town. And, for all that earnest folks in bright lanyards can be seen chatting animatedly through the windows of the more well-to-do hotels and bars, all the delegates add to the tetchiness a cloud of guilt and trepidation (when they venture beyond the temporary compound that is the City Hall). Not a bad night for going to see the two former halves of “Scottish miserablists” (q. everyone) Arab Strap then, you’d have thought.

In place of his more usual mode, undercutting jaunty pop and acoustic loveliness with self-loathing, Malcolm Middleton is trying out a new style, hence the billing (the one song in more familiar tone “probably won‘t be on the album“). Using a pedal to sample himself on electric guitar he carefully builds a series of more repetitive, drawn out soundscapes, not unlike a one-man Mogwai but gentler, warm and perfectly experienced from a rickety theatre seat with a big bottle of nice beer to hand.

I’m not sure Aidan Moffatt’s songs have ever been that miserable. They’ve been about misery, uncertainty and the like, but there’s always been plenty of humour and heart. Performing alone, mainly with autoharp but also with a Cutleresque squeezebox and an inexpertly manhandled strumstick, Moffatt treats a not-exactly-packed theatre to a series of bleakly funny and sometimes genuinely moving songs from across his career. He focuses on the banal or the raw rather than on the romantic aspects of love, yes, but he’s just as adept at drawing the romance and emotion out of banality and rawness. With his voice sounding less harsh than in the past and with freedom to roam he makes for a genial host. The one more discordant moment is possibly the highlight of the set, when he borrows Middleton’s self sampling trick to overlay strums and plucks of the autoharp, with each gradually distorting to create an insistent but affecting wall of noise. All in all it makes for a gentle and oddly uplifting evening.

So, as we bumble away past the raucously underdressed crowds on West St (the ones who’ll actually be living the Arab Strap experience come the small hours) we do so with a warmth in our hearts. One that‘s unlikely to be shared by those in the hotels of Sheffield tonight…

Links:
http://www.aidanmoffat.co.uk/
http://www.malcolmmiddleton.co.uk/
http://www.myspace.com/fuckinaidanjohnmoffat