LIVE REVIEW: MALCOLM MIDDLETON

Malcolm Middleton
London
Scala
11th December 2007

Space floats up inside the Scala. Faces are gapped in regiment. Eyes are glassed and lit with waiting. There’s a scream. Feedback is tangling from microphones and desperate hands and feet disrupt the peace on stage. They’re trying to make everything OK, to squeeze the sounds out perfectly. But that would be missing the point. This ex-Arab Strap man fae Falkirk, bright with freckles, has been called a miserablist. Yet he is a powerful massager of black temple thoughts: a soother of broken and missing parts. Tonight he overcomes wincing mics to breathe life into lyrics that make listeners lighter through their shared angles and real life symmetry. Malcolm sticks pins in emotion roots, braids pain with his acoustic charms and bounces us with sharp beats. Tonight he keenly feels the wire-stiff oddness of the crowd and shuts his eyes against it. Brows fold down over the buttons of them as his voice weaves into songs given rich life by the searingly sweet words of Jenny Reeve. It hardly matters if he makes Christmas number one or not. The songs are here and now: ‘Fight Like the Night’ blisters as an urgent sign-off. This music shifts atmospheres, and the Scala stirs. Malcolm surmises the change in mood laughingly, but we know it surely and clearly: we’re smiling because we’re all going to die. We’re smiling because we saw Scottish melancholic magic before we did.

Lindsey Kent