User ratings in Music are temporarily disabled. More info
- Summary: British visual artist David Shrigley's words were turned into music by Arab Strap co-founder Malcolm Middleton in this collaboration that also features Bridget McCann, Gavin Mitchell, and Scott Vermeire.
Buy Now
- Record Label: Melodic
- Genre(s): Pop/Rock
- More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 2 out of 9
-
Mixed: 7 out of 9
-
Negative: 0 out of 9
-
Dec 9, 2014Shifting perspectives and clever juxtapositions are all over this album, Middleton and Shrigley have created an album that on the face of it appears to be simple, but there’s untold depth here, as well as some endlessly creative swearing.
-
Dec 12, 2014Through it all, Middleton somehow locates the appropriate settings for Shrigley’s perverse poems (or is it the other way round?) with charging techno pulses animating the hysterical protests of a teenager appalled at the vandal antics of a “Houseguest”, and chuntering stomp-beats illustrating the grotesque primitivism of a homicidal “Caveman.”
-
Dec 9, 2014Shrigley’s work is not for everyone, and Middleton has only a cult following; while Words And Music won’t change either of those facts, the prospect of someone stumbling across this record by mistake makes it more than a worthwhile endeavour.
-
Dec 9, 2014Turner prize-nominee Shrigley’s misanthropic worldview-- murderous cavemen, sadistic houseguests and monkeys eating their offspring are among the topics covered--is present and correct, although not everything here benefits from the surreal linguistic twists of his solo work. When he does catch you off guard, it’s splendid stuff.
-
Dec 15, 2014The album works because the two men, both fortysomething and either born Scottish (Middleton) or Glasgow School of Art-educated (Shrigley), share a puerile, misanthropic simpatico and a rinky-dink, borderline outsider approach to their art, in which social niceties are frequently torched.
-
Jan 20, 2015A bizarre little record, Music And Words was seemingly kicked off in 2007. With a seven-year gestation, it would be nigh on impossible to maintain a full sense of coherency, but the twin artists just about manage it.
-
Q MagazineDec 16, 2014Shrigley's humour quickly suffers from the law of diminishing returns; once the initial shock has dissipated, it fails to stand up to repeated listening. [Jan 2015, p.128]
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 0 out of
-
Mixed: 0 out of
-
Negative: 0 out of