Malcolm Middleton - Slight of Heart

He’s nothing if not productive, Malcolm Middleton. Slight of Heart is his third album in four years, hot on the heels of the irony-tastic Make Malcolm Middleton Christmas Number One campaign, headed up by the ever-tedious Radio One and thousands of Facebook types, seemingly desperate to get the We’re All Going to Die bandwagon to the festive top-spot in place of, erm, a bandwagon.

Whilst this hype did give Middleton a moment in something resembling the spotlight, and this new record could therefore be his biggest selling to date, the prolific nature of his output seems to have been at the expense of consistent quality. Middleton’s first album after the split of Arab Strap was a bittersweet opus of malevolent folk, spiked adeptly with infectious synth, but its follow-up was weak in parts. Slight of Heart has entirely removed the electro sensibilities of that early record, Into the Woods, and we’re left with something which sees Middleton conforming to stereotype, a dreary album of Scottish miserablism without the self-effacing wit we originally loved him for, nor the instantaneous hooks that defied his pessimistic outlook.

Much of it is simply too dull, and that’s before you decide whether his well-trodden lyricism of unrequited love, laziness and hitting the bottle is a well-worked trademark or a tiresome cliché.

Its not, however, an album that’s completely without merit, and opener Week Off finds Middleton in fine form on typical subject matter: doing nothing, writing songs and getting pissed. It’s an introduction, though, that serves mainly to underline the failings of track two, the lyrically awful Blue Plastic Bags (which contain “six bottles of Stella, Jacob’s Creek and 20 fags.”), a song which, even by Middleton’s standards, is ridiculously world-weary. Total Belief is nothing we haven’t heard him do better before and Just Like Anything just seems, like, tired.

Follow Robin Down picks things up again, with a fuller sound in comparison to the mainly acoustic-with-a-bit-of-string composition of the rest of the album, but Madonna cover Stay will have Samaritans phonelines working overtime, and not in a good, Elliott Smith way, merely a please-make-it-stop way. Marguerita Red begins with a jaunty introduction, but loses its way hopelessly, and Love Comes in Waves begins tunelessly and meanders off into pretty much nothing.

It seems the step-backwards that A Brighter Beat hinted at has unfortunately became a fully fledged leap, Total Belief having Middleton lurching into an all-too-serious point that “this is shit, and that is shit, and being shit is great.” The man also once said “I don’t wanna write these shit songs any more” and it was once ironic. Now it’s a little too close to the truth.