Everything's Getting Older

This is perhaps his most beautiful work to date; its vulgarity is restrained but a sense of humour remains, and Wells and Moffat reach new emotional heights.

Everything's Getting Older proving that, despite his wrinkles and back ache, Moffat's never going to shave his head/convert to Buddhism, and is still the scowling, contemptuous, but eloquent philanderer he was when he was tearing up the '90s--except now, he's a little more comfortable, and attacks using serene piano accompaniments.

It's easy to revel in Moffat's bleak wordplay and his everyman observations, but behind the black clouds and bitterness there are reminders of love and tempered optimism, encompassed by The Greatest Story Ever Told.

The net result, a tapestry through dark alleys and along river banks, makes for an entertaining listening journey.

As with some diseases, the album gets worse before it gets better, but by the end you're left stunned in admiration. Hell, there's even a redemptive arc. Amazing.

Throughout, Wells' arrangements are excellently matched with Moffat's lyrics and performances song for song.

Not a party album.

He calls love and life as it really is: occasionally sweet, rarely trouble-free and often so suicidally routine we could all become the man he speaks of on 'Ballad Of The Bastard'.

It's neither an easy nor a joyful listen, but tolerate the unrelenting gloom and it is never less than absorbing.

Don't believe a word of it; this mediation on aging has moments as filthy as anything from his X-rated past. [Jun 2011, p.125]

Wells adds waves of beauty, and flurries of click-track neurosis to Moffat's dispatches from the fringes of self-disgust. [Jun 2011, p.91]