Available from aidanjohnmoffat.bandcamp.com
Thom Yorke, U2, Aidan Moffat. All three have released an out-of-the-blue album in digital format in the past few weeks, but only the ex-Arab Strap man's efforts are likely to receive repeated plays in the long term.
Vagrants describes itself as songs that are "begging for change by the side of the superhighway, the abandoned hobos brushing off digital dust and leaping from the virtual shelf". In other words, it gathers up ten tracks that haven't fitted in on other full-length albums: six unreleased plus four rareties almost impossible to acquire elsewhere.
Among them are three superlative cover versions, the kind of thing Moffat made his own on his 2011 mini-album, Stolen Songs - Glen Campbell's Love Is Not A Game, George Moxey's comical calypso Monkey Talk and (the album's standout) Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe, on which Moffat wrings raw emotion out of something that has become pop-culturally shop-soiled.
Elsewhere, lo-fi fragments and longer pieces (The World Around Us) cast an observational eye over the everyday trials of human life. Whether he's performing heartbreak karaoke or urine-stained street poetry, Moffat has an uncanny ability to make music that touches the hardened Scottish soul.
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