'I don't think anyone in Britain since Joy Division has known how to make seriously depressing music,' claims Aidan Moffat, singer and lyricist of Arab Strap. Philophobia is his attempt to redress the balance. To sullen yet insidiously catchy lo-fi music composed by collaborator Malcolm Middleton, Moffat mumbles his sorry, jarringly frank tales of urban squalor, bitterness and love gone badly wrong. Like the Tindersticks (only without the glamour), it's so darkly funny and perversely beautiful that you can't help listening to it without a big smile on your face.
The Daily Telegraph - 18th April, 1998
This Scottish indie band provide the music for that Guinness advert about statistics being made up, a peculiar marriage of acoustic guitars and a primitive House beat. They stick to the formula throughout their second album, with the addition of vocalist Aidan Moffat's drunken slurring about grim parties and even grimmer sexual encounters.
Philophobia takes its title from the fear of being loved, and in theory sounds like a singularly unappealing experience. In practice, there's a seedy seductiveness about Arab Strap. Moffat's lyrics have attracted lazy comparisons to Irvine Welsh, but have a frankness and a loser-friendly charm all of their own.
Stumbling around the words, the fumbled guitar-lines and lo-fi beats make perfect sense, capturing a sodden early-hours melancholy, like Tom Waits drunk on Tennant's Super.
ALEXIS PETRIDIS
Independent On Sunday - 19th April, 1998
Also released tomorrow is the second album from a rather less celebrated duo, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, aka Arab Strap. With Philophobia, Middleton has given up the musical experimentation of 1996's The Week Never Starts Round Here, and settled on a low-key, faltering, indie guitar sound that, at it's best, can recall the last Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Anyway, he does a decent job of complementing the drizzly, 4am-in-Falkirk tone of Moffat's muttered lyrics, and it's these that make Arab Strap unique. With a sad and straight-faced sense of humour and an eye for smelly, itchy detail, Moffat's grim tales of bad sex and break-ups are an antidote to every airbrushed love song currently polluting the charts. It's a sort of Blood On The Tracks with blood on the sheets.
Some of his lyrics could be by a morose, Scottish Jarvis Cocker, and in a few albums' time Arab Strap could make a sudden Pulp-style breakthrough. If you buy Philophobia now, you'll be able to say you were a fan back in the early days. In the meantime, it's worth owning any album that finishes a song with the mumbled couplet: "He tried to kick my head in to impress her 'cause he was trying to poke her/ I came home greeting and bleeding and my Mum threatened to go round to her house and choke her."
MOJO - May 1998
The Strap's second album refines the raw promise of their 1996 debut The Week Never Starts Round Here.
In which Falkirkian reprobates Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat confirm themselves as the Goffin and King of their generation. Anyone with a mind to disagree should try the exquisitely maudlin single 'Here We Go' for size: "How am I supposed to walk you home when you're at least 50 feet ahead?/'Cos you walked off in a huff, and I'm that pissed I can't remember what it was I said." The first time you hear Philophobia, it'll seem so quiet you'll hardly notice it. The second time you hear it, you'll be so desperate to find out exactly what the words are you will feel constrained to drive everyone else out of the house and shoot the neighbours' dog. The third time, you'll be giving the dog the kiss of life so it can howl along with you to such unforgettable landmarks of self-excoriation as 'I Would've Liked Me A Lot Last Night'. Refracting the sad-core sensibilities of Smog and Will Oldham through bleary smalltown Scottish eyes.
BEN THOMPSON