Highlights: Let’s Stop Here, A Short Song To The Moon, Ballad Of The Bastard, (If You) Keep Me In Your Heart, The Greatest Story Ever Told
Everything’s Getting Older is art of relentlessly mature, adult sort. Created by Bill Wells and Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat, the record is a gorgeous suite of elegant melodies, bitter-sweet lyrics and vibes, and palpable, real-life emotions.
The album’s theme is, naturally, growing old, and it is conveyed with great feeling and conviction. The mood, naturally, is bleak and cheerless. Some of the songs are sung and some are narrated in Aidan’s deeply authentic Scottish accent that gives this album so much personality and charm. Everything’s Getting Older is mostly made up of haunting, stirring piano ballads/instrumentals. But even when Wells and Moffat go for something different, like on the spiky, funky “Glasgow Jubilee”, the results are largely effective (the groove in that one is almost as addictive as it gets). My bet for the best song would be the poignant, affecting “Ballad Of The Bastard” – which is both dirty and deeply, mercilessly moving.
A triumph of delicate and depressing beauty, Everything’s Getting Older is certainly a mood piece. But it’s fantastically tuneful too – a bonus you obviously can’t write off. Terrific stuff.
8/10
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