Albums of 2008: #19

(Yes, this is meant to start at 19. That will bring us to the end of the year and it's the exact number of albums that I can sufficiently support to want to write about.)

Aidan John Moffat - I Can Hear Your Heart



Bar one very long closing ramble, nothing on I Can Hear Your Heart stretches to the 2 minute mark. Track one of this CD is an instruction to make sure that you read the booklet before

beginning. Never mind the mainstream, this stretches the definition of an album. It's certainly one of the more wonderfully unique recordings this year.



Back in 2003, Chemikal Underground released a compiltion album with a spoken word secret track called "Cunts" ('by Aidan Moffat aged 29 1/2'). Back then it was an amusing afterthought, but newly reprised with a crackly, dusty musical accompaniment it sounds as tired as it does funny, a fitting start to a very dark listen.



Free of even the limited shackles of Arab Strap, Moffat has fully taken the freedom to be as crude and frank as possible, and certainly doesn't paint a pretty picture of himself or anyone else around him. Barely anyone you meet isn't manipulative and weak and the everpresent sex is full of regret and uncertainy more often than it is joyful. In one of the most amusing moments, "Hopelessly Devoted" specualtes on the future of relationships of characters of Grease and assumes it to have probably been 'a sexless pretence dragged out too long'.



But for all the darkness there is redemption in the droll humour and in the beautifully ancient sounding string arrangements that perfectly offset the words and link together the little vignettes into a really satisfying flow of ideas. Albeit one that's ocassionally interrupted by screeching answerphone messages from someone saved in Aidan's address book as '4SEX'.



Not an album I've returned to as often as any above it in the list, but every time I do its ambition and candour is freshly pleasing.