Into the Woods Reviews

Brutally candid, stirringly melodious, second solo outing from moonlighting Arab Strap guitarist
Malcolm Middleton’s solo debut, 2002’s *5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine, was an exercise in autobiographical introspection that was as bleak as its unwieldy title was difficult to remember. *Into The Woods, its belated follow up, is an equally self-lacerating affair: “You’re gonna break my heart I know it/And when you do, I’m gonna run to the country and plug my ears/I’d rather have you than sing these shit songs...” Middleton cautions with typical frankness on opener Break My Heart. Musically, however, this is a quite different animal to both its fragile predecessor and Arab Strap’s angsty barstool blues.

Despite his assertions, Middleton’s songs are anything but *merde*. Instead, the album’s 12 crisply recorded essays - by turns chiming, urgent and elegiac - revel in a beguiling incongruity, equal parts brusque confession and soaring epiphany. Lyrically dour songs titled Devastation and Loneliness Shines come swathed in glittering electric guitars, euphoric keyboards and unequivocal drumming. “There’s nothing weird about hating yourself/When you've seen the hours I’ve spent / Darkness comes and darkness goes /Just like my good times went”, goes the stark, acoustic guitar framed verse of Monday Night Nothing before a sudden, exhilarating rush of piano and power chords instantly transform the mood.

This warts’n’all realism that can’t help but reveal its ecstatic soul. And while Middleton’s declamatory singing style and unreconstructed Falkirk accent lend genuine grain to narratives of kitchen sink veracity, there’s also playful drollery in a delivery which relishes the colloquial and delights in Irn-Bru authenticity and the poetry of the ordinary. “I was just about to carve the turkey and watch Eastenders/Cos’ they’re my friends and my friends are strangers”, notes on the exquisitely desolate Yuletide memoir Burst Noel.

Allegedly inspired by both Dennis Wilson’s iconic Pacific Ocean Blue and a six month slough of despondency following a 2001 Arab Strap tour, Middleton marshals his muse with the aid of miscellaneous Caledonian indie eminences plucked from the ranks of Mogwai, The Reindeer Section and the recently split Delgados. Fellow Strapper Aidan Moffat even lends a hand. The arrangements are deceptively meticulous, variously recalling (by way of appropriate reciprocity) Belle And Sebastian’s The Boy With The Arab Strap, the Delgados’ The Great Eastern and, on the pulsating, electronically enhanced Happy Medium, a clinically depressed Lemon Jelly.

Literate, genuinely provocative modern British guitar music is thin on the ground these days, which makes Into The Woods a welcome revelation and, in a musical age which prizes style over content, an unlikely cause for optimism. On this evidence Malcolm Middleton will soon be describing Arab Strap as his side project.
5/5 | MOJO

You can't help but develop a wee soft spot for Malcolm Middleton. Even when the sometime Arab Strapper sets out to produce a happy album, inspired by Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue, he still writes a song like 'Burst Noel' (sample lyric: 'Lying on the bathroom floor/ I don't wanna ho ho ho no more'). The boy can't help it, he seethes with epic disappointment and it's all laid bare for our voyeuristic scrutiny.

While his morale languishes somewhere in a cold Falkirk bedsit, melodically his songs whoop from mountain peaks. It's an uplifting musical intelligence that coaxes you into treasuring Into the Woods. Despite an eclectic melange of piano, fiddle, cello, and fuzzy guitar, nothing wildly avant-garde happens but it's wrapped in exemplary tunes unsullied by excess.

'Loneliness Shines' is Dinosaur Jr high on the psychedelic euphoria of the Flaming Lips, while 'Modest Bear' squelches like a narcotic robo duet.His voice, which threatens to wobble off-key at any moment, spews forth his interior monologue in a mesmerising burr.

Middleton's deadpan analysis of romantic failure is sharpened with a dark wit. It's not that he has a dyspeptic view of life. More that he stares it in the face with a clear gaze, and the crystal clarity makes for bruised magic.
4/5 | Observer Music Monthly

I recall a compilation advertised on prime time television not so long ago that was pitched solely at those wanting to use music to enhance whatever depressing experience they were crawling through at the time. The suspects were usual enough - Mr Acoustic Sings A Ballad From A Film About Girls, Big Band Gets Introspective And Discover Feelings, Breakthrough Artist Realises Dollars Are To Be Made From Plundering His Little Sister's Diary - and no doubt Mr BuysFiveRecordsAYear dutifully obliged, but what if you really wanted to compile a Slit-Yr-Wrists Greatest Hits? Joy Division and Smog? Perhaps some Bright Eyes? In my best Scottish burr, fuck that; just buy this.

It's not that Malcolm Middleton's second solo album is particularly bleak - the music is often absolutely gorgeous, with glorious pop hooks passing through My Bloody Valentine-style walls of guitars and back into cheap and chattering disco beats. Instead, it's a deceptive beast that buries its bruised heart beneath layers of pristine smiles and happy high spirits. Play Into The Woods while, for example, washing up or cleaning the bathroom or driving through country lanes with screaming kids kicking the back of the seat in, and you'll hear nothing but the aesthetic gloss; it's when you spend a little time with Middleton that his songs really hit home, through headphones on quiet trains with the unreachable outside world racing by. Well, 'hit home' is selling this record short - at its darkest, when Middleton's pained reflections reach their feverish peaks, it spears the heart and tears it out of your chest, spilling blood and splintering bone without so much as semblance of sadism.

"I never seem to make the right decision any time," muses Middleton on 'Monday Night Nothing'. If he did, perhaps it wouldn't make a difference: "It's only a matter of time before I feel like shit again," he sighs later on the same song. Thematically, Into The Woods largely treads water amongst the flotsam of failed relationships, lost to the depths of despair, but even when Middleton sings of love that lasts he does so with the pessimism of a man scarred so many times before - "Stay with me..." he pleads on 'Bear With Me', "...I'll always stay with you." Despite such obvious underlying feelings of commitment and honesty, Middleton proceeds to dissect his imperfections across these twelve tracks to the extent where any partner wouldn't be able to see anything but the ugly and unwanted. It's truly, deeply saddening when he near-whispers "How can you like me, with this head and these arms? How long can I be myself before you get up and go?" on genuine standout 'Devastation', so much so that the equally cheerily-titled 'Loneliness Shines' (those MBV walls) sounds totally euphoric. He goes further still on the otherwise cheerful dance beats 'n' clicks of 'A Happy Medium': "My face is a disease."

The variety, and quality, of Middleton's compositions ensures that his heart-weary stories never grow as tired as his laconic voice might imply; indeed, some six or seven listens later I'm still discovering new facets to songs that initially sound simplistic. The subject matters may not vary wildly, but Middleton's engrossing and imaginative lyrics are worthy of published poets; his tone may not wobble from mumble to shriek, but his near-monotone conveys more colourful emotion and simple fuckin' passion than any hyperactive floppy-fringed frontman. Only the boisterous 'A New Heart', the album's final chapter, steers clear of melancholy long enough to comprise something of an uplifting closer.

"I wasn't meant to feel this way," he says, his voice stumbling into silence. The truth: we wouldn't want him feeling any other way if such ill feelings produce such stunning music. So forget your made-for-television angst and your soulless songtresses weaving woeful tales of ones that got away - this is the real, raw, warts-and-all deal.
8/10 | Drowned In Sound