Scottish 'Revolutionaries'. Pervy name, possibly. Did some music for a Guinness advert apparently (anything for a free pint etc. haw haw). They are Primal Scream's spiritual cousins, quest-for-oblivion-wise, and this is tremendous.
It's pub-stool-story music, 4am spliffed-up Scottish rap, if you will, which means Aidan Moffat is talking to you from the bottom of his second bottle of gin about being "drunk in the sun", with "the skin peeling off ma beery face" and he wants to tell you his tale: "It was cool when we all left together last night/Half two in the morning I swear it was light/You ran up ahead/We brought up the rear/By the time we arrived, you'd drank all our beer". Now there's lovely.
"Went our for the weekend," sings someone who can definitely yodel, "it lasted forever". Which, really, is a 'Champagne Supernova'-like spirit on bottles of Concorde round the back of the vans that sell you fags for 20p each, the thieving swines.
This is sleepy to the point of floating, naked, in a gigantic Mogadon milkshake. Organ bits, funny percussion, 'bairns' piano ('Chopsticks' to you, Sassenach), hand-claps, Lou Reed, Joy Division, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Felt (ask an indie loser) with the sound knowledge that life is shite but it's funny anyway.
Melody Maker Single Of The Week - 6th September 1997
What a fantastic cover, scattered with photographs of old girlfriends/female pals in "Gareth's back garden" (Laura Liddell), or "Pennie's Nightclub" (Morag Campbell) in a real celebration of real women, possibly the last thing you'd expect of the boys whose best known record is an ode to ecstasy and lager and easy nightclub "birds". But Arab Strap are great at surprises. And there's more on this EP.
"Hey! Fever" is unnervingly good-natured for Aidan and Malcolm, some of the most eloquent swearers in Scotland. It's about staying up drinking beer til it gets light, getting your girl's advice before embarking on a haircut, fumbling about messily under the duvet with her until her mum noisily makes her way up the stairs. Although the story ends, as is usual for Arab Strap, with awkwardness and disappointment, the track itself is relentlessly cheerful, even ending with some proper ensemble singing, a gospel choir version of "The First Day Of Summer" chorus.
"The Girls Of Summer" is even better - a paean to bare legs, trainers and "white straps", it's Neil Young-steeped twang is suitably elegiac and, like most of Arab Strap's stuff, melancholic and memory-made. Mogwai sadness hangs in the air like fairy dust.
It strikes me that Aidan's laconic non-vocal says nothing so much as it says that he's as soft and bruisable as a peach, half-embarrassed at the emotional content and potential giveaway language of his lyrics but determined not to cop out of them. I wonder, do boys retain every teenage romance and break up with this clarity and strange mixture of bitterness and fondness? Shit I do hope not.
KITTY EMPIRE