Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – The Most Important Place In The World
- Written by Amy Finlayson
Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat first worked together back in 2003 on Arab Strap’s album Monday at the Hug & Pint and pledged then to make an album together. It took a while but it was worth the wait. 2011’s Everything’s Getting Older was an album of rare beauty and raw truth, focusing on facing up to middle age. In June 2012 it picked up the inaugural Scottish Album of the Year Award.
With the duo’s follow-up, The Most Important Place In The World, the tone changes slightly, the focus shifts. But it still offers brutally honest lyrics, throwing bare the dredge of everyday existence, married with stark, instrumentally scant music. It’s almost more spoken word than anything else, the lyrics pure poetry.
It’s an album that begins by surprising you, using a car’s indicator to keep tempo as an extra instrument in ‘On The Motorway’. It’s a brilliant addition and the song perfectly explores the contrast between dreams and reality:
“I was dreaming we’d lifted off/Like Sandy and Danny and Grease Lightning/Soaring to somewhere cloudless/With a tank full of hope and a trunk full of plans”
As Moffat himself says: “It’s about the life we want versus the life we need – and deciding which is which.”
‘This Dark Desire’ could be seen as the beating heart of the album, its sentiments summing up the sinew of the rest of the tracks:
“This is the soul of the city/Our glory stripped/Our passions laid bare/Real life/Raw life/Reckless life”
In this vein, the album veers between bleak and beautiful, just as you start to feel torn apart, you are lulled into submission by the softly edged Scottish burr of Moffat’s voice on ‘The Tangle Of Us’ - reminiscent of the contrast between a thistle and the soft moors, it made me yearn for more of his singing rather than him speaking.
The wordplay throughout is a delight - in the ‘The Unseen Man’ we see a man who is an unnecessary spectacle wearing unnecessary spectacles. Each song is a vignette, beautifully told, a glimpse at a scene, making the mundane magnificent.
It ends on a perfect note with the grim yet defiant ‘We’re Still Here’, the world around us is crumbling, we walk through the streets with all the shops demised:
“The letting agents lost their lease/Their rent was in arrears/And the jewellers lost their sparkle now/But we’re still here”
And we are, and we continue to be. So, what shall it be? Shall we drown our sorrows or make a cup of tea?
The Most Important Place In The World is available from amazon & iTunes.