Album review: Malcolm Middleton - 'Waxing Gibbous'

There’s a thin line in pop between being a miserablist, a miner of nuggets of beauty from the dark rock walls of despair and a common-or-garden maudlin sod who just wants to ruin everybody else’s day. Despite once releasing a Christmas single called ‘We’re All Going To Die’, Scottish troubadour Malcolm Middleton’s tent
is pitched firmly in the former camp.
His new set is disarmingly jaunty, occasionally odd – as on the scratchy electro-folk of ‘Don’t Want To Sleep Tonight’ – and frequently lovely, chiefly on the parched reverie of ‘Ballad Of Fuck All’. Gibbous describes the state of a moon that is midway between being half and full – which is not a bad one-word review.

Pete Cashmore

More on this artist:
Malcolm Middleton NME Artist Page
Hauschka MySpace


6 out of 10