NME
By now, and after all (and everyone) he claims to have been through, you'd imagine Aidan Moffat to be sufficiently well-equipped to deal with the pain of rejection and the fear of failure. Like his apparent dipsomania, though, Falkirk's favourite bedroom existentialist's philophobia seems incurable. Yet while his catalogue of sticky carnal errors shows few signs of abating, after three albums and enough soiled Andrex to mummify a litter of Labradors, Moffat is at last resolved to accept his unfortunate lot.
Having extricated themselves from Go! Beat, the foolhardy major label which funded Arab Strap's most difficult release, 'Elephant Shoe', Moffat and his sickly musical foil Malcolm Middleton are now back at their original home, Chemikal Underground. Less a cause for celebration than opportunity for sombre reflection, the pair's fourth studio album once again renders naval-gazing a fine art as Moffat, very much the Tracy Emin of misanthropic mumbled indie rock, selects prurient lowlights from past awkward encounters and, secretly, wonders if he can still get away with it.
He does, not least because after five years spent meticulously documenting his own top shelf shortcomings, Moffat has acquired a knowledge of female anatomy and emotion that would probably be best used replying to letters on the problem pages of J-17. That he keeps making the same mistakes with the same people in the same intoxicated situations is, if not yet slightly predictable for him, then it's a concept that's wearing a little thin for everyone else. Most people like a drink. No-one likes a drunk. Especially one stuck on repeat.
According to Eastern theology, there is an invisible red thread that links soulmates through time. With Arab Strap, it could be a euphemism for a mild strain of STD, an infection that connects Moffat with all his sexual partners. But 'The Red Thread' is a frequently beautiful record, as dark and twisted and funny as anything the band have ever produced. And slowly, after many listens, events fall into focus. Middleton's funereal accompaniment, spartan and cautious like a smackhead trying to play Van Halen solos while wearing oven gloves ('The Long Sea'), often pretty and inventive ('Love Detective'), still sounds unfinished without Moffat's poetic drawl.
If the subject matter is familiar, it is to Moffat's credit and skill as a lyricist that he conjures such vital imagery from these crusty memories. "You always jump and quiver when you're coming in to land, with no runway, no guidance, no nails dug into my hand", he whispers over the muffled disco of 'Turbulence', ever the sympathetic narrator of countless intimate domestic docu-dramas. The song remains the same, then, broken and unfixable. Romance isn't dead. He just looks that way when he's pissed.
PIERS MARTIN
Scotland on Sunday
On this, Arab Strap's fourth album, Aidan Moffat's lyrics read like scripts and sound like dialogue from faintly grubby kitchen sink dramas, only these days he has half a mind to do the dishes rather than just urinate all over them. "Everywhere I go/There's so much on show/Everyone is beautiful/But I stay dutiful," he bemoans in the chorus of 'Scenery', before suggesting the only way this loyalty can be maintained would be by cutting off his hands and blinding himself.
"...at least we're sated and we're tired/at least the bedroom stinks/and we know that we're desired," he croons with a certain animal grace on 'Infrared', concentrating on the scent not the stench. If all this seems like the same old, if better told, story, it is taken to better, more beautiful places by Malcolm Middleton's playing and arrangements, which run the gamut from the fragile to the fiercely oppressed.
Just listen to 'Love Detective' for confirmation that the band have done more than merely serve up a reprise of previous outings. Over what is perilously close to jazz swing, Moffat sifts through the ashes of mutual trust gone up in smoke, part wronged sensitive boy and part seedy stalker. This sets the tone for a heady rush to the climax of 'The Red Thread'. With strings that could sell shampoo, 'Haunt Me' features the closest to a conventionally sung vocal in the band's career, before reverting to form and the norm with the closing 'Turbulence'.
"We won't always be safe here/But this is where we reign," is an acknowledgement of the comfort found in familiar emotional and musical territory, but by returning there the degenerates have become regenerates. It is hard to see this winning any new converts to the Arab Strap cause, but it will certainly rekindle belief among the faithful.
COLIN SOMMERVILLE
The Big Issue
Falkirk, if you believe Arab Strap, is the kind of place you want to get out of; full of resentment and drugs and bad nights out and threats involving knives. Rearing their head five years ago, and finding fleeting fame as the soundtrack to a Guinness advert (the one that quoted all the statistics), they cut their first album on the Delgado's Chemikal Underground label, before upping sticks and moving to a major.
Two albums on, and they are back on Chemikal Underground. Similarly, there's something about Falkirk that Arab Strap keep coming back to; it's their home, it made them what they are. It makes sense to them.
'The Red Thread' refers to a concept in Eastern mythology, the belief that there's an invisible red thread that links soul mates through time. And so it is with Arab Strap and Falkirk; there's no getting away from the place no matter where you go. 'The Red Thread' seems full of it, Aidan Moffat's spoken word tales of small city flings gone wrong, backed by claustrophobic guitars, tin-pot percussion and swooping strings.
'The Long Sea' feels rain-lashed, as bitter and angry as a just-jilted lover walking home in a hailstorm, whilst the single, 'Love Detective' - a vicious vignette about a man discovering his girlfriend's 'sex diary' ("and it got worse as it went on, the dates never made sense, people I'd never heard of. Eventually I had to stop reading it 'cause I started to feel sick") - sees Moffat's bored central belt drawl backed by a slouching Seventies cop movie piano and shuffling breakbeats.
Over 10 tracks, Moffat's lyrics (though they're not lyrics really, more short stories) cover a range of broken relationships and bodily sins, and Malcolm Middleton's tendencies towards minimalism are augmented by lush orchestration and gossamer guitar lines. It's a return to form from the country's blackest-humoured misanthropes, that invisible red thread still linking them to their home town.
LEON MCDERMOTT
The Village Voice
What were once vices are now habits. The Doobie Brothers said that. (Well, they named an album that.) (No, I don't own it, Skunk.) I bet the Scottish boys in Arab Strap have spent a few nights pissing in strange alleys at four in the morning, perhaps pondering the gist of this aphorism. They have a few habits themselves. For a handful of albums and singles over the last couple of years, the duo - Aidan Moffat on vocals, Malcolm Middleton on guitar - have been getting high and breaking their own hearts and staring at wallpaper in rooms of girls they've just met, of girls they've known since grade school, or of their own damn selves. They don't merely hint at the dark side of chemical love; they reveal it completely. Romance in the time of Ecstasy, according to Arab Strap, is a complicated and often mundane thing, spiked by moments of bursting out of your own skin. With 'The Red Thread', album five, this terrain seems the only place they live. Though I'm not complaining.
Named after a special cock-ring device (I don't know, ask Steve Albini, he always talks about 'em), Arab Strap are kind of a fan band. Their early recordings (1996 debut longplayer 'The Week Never Starts Around Here' and 'The Girls of Summer E.P.' from 1997) have a music lover's na?vet?: basic beats you could cop off any Casio, limited guitar vocabulary, vocalist warbling in the shadows of a perpetual last call. When they get the sweat, the passion, and the love of Joy Division and English Isles folk right, you can really have your hands full. Like the Doobie Bros., Arab Strap have a singer who croons straight from the beard. Not because he has something to hide; rather, Moffat - whether you think he's a generous diarist or just an open book - is nothing if not unsparing. Blow-by-blow accounts of nights out and endless afternoons-as-mornings, spoke-sung in 88 percent decipherable Scottish, crest against your ankles and pull you under. On the creeping-to-rolling-to-really-rolling 'Girls of Summer,' Moffat huffs about tan lines on the peeling shoulders of a group of girls with the straps of their tank tops shrugged off. He pretty much freezes time, and you might as well be sitting on the corner with him.
Club-based music tends to pulse in the present tense. So do the drugs you usually find near a dancefloor. On the right night you can convince yourself there will be no tomorrow, no comedown, no end to a bassline. And club music's lyrical content tends to back this up?lots of dancefloor as freedom, plenty of tonight-is-forever. Arab Strap usurp the things that make dance music euphoric, but they pack a heavy conscience for the trip. On the version of 'Girls of Summer' on last year's live 'Mad for Sadness,' they break up the EP's noisy, droning burst with a swift skip into a lockjawed four-on-the-floor that starts like an early-'90s Touch & Go band covering Underworld then stutters into waking up damp with sweat after two hours of sleep. Arab Strap's nights aren't as glossy or tacky as Soft Cell's naughty-little-cokehead tales used to be; their days after sound less gussied up with New Age awakening than Ride or the Doves. You get an eternal cycle: boredom, anticipation, rapture, comedown, resignation, boredom. And they somehow make it all breathtaking.
So, 'The Red Thread'. Ten more songs about screwing somebody you're supposed to have split up with in sheets of guilt and dropping E at a crap disco? Not entirely. Arab Strap mix the stoic, set-permanently-at-dawn folk whispers of last year's Elephant Shoe with the beat-friendly sense of their best early singles: "The First Big Weekend," "(Afternoon) Soaps," "Cherubs." The music sheds its amateur charm for the sound of a band in control of its art and its drum machines. And whereas on previous albums things could get a little static, The Red Thread's long-winded dirges usually have pop numbers buffering the despair - "Love Detective" 's shamus-skitter, for instance, relieving the yearning of "The Long Sea."
There are still sitting-in-the-shit moments; check when Moffat rolls over and mutters, "At least we know we're still fuckable," in "Infrared." But the power of this pair doesn't necessarily come from their willingness to stand in front of a bathroom mirror under uncomplimentary light; it comes from what they notice when they look in. On "Screaming in the Trees" (the Lanegan revival starts here!), backed by a simple guitar line, Moffat sings about a liaison with an ex, "Your shoes could have woken up the whole street," and then admits, shaking with anticipation before a possible kiss, "It's hard to believe I'm fully grown." It's moments like this when I really fall for them: the scabs on a girl's knees, the searching for a lover's sex journal, the shouting over bar noise a conversation that should've been whispered in private.
The album closes with "Turbulence" - their best song yet; fuck that, the best song this year - which feels like your heart skipping while you dance in your room to New Order's "Leave Me Alone." Moffat's we're-drunk/we-might-break-up/we're-at-a-weird-party story passes by with the desolation of billboards through a car window, and with immense heaviness, swallowing something it's dying to tell. Finding a moment of inebriated peace and safety with a love that very well may end soon, he sings, "Pull it tight to protect us/we might never sleep again." The drug of living in the moment wears off and becomes a realization of emptiness. All in the same song. It will make you put that magazine away and really listen (no small feat).
Love songs are the lowest common denominator of pop. Everyone's got a few (like for instance Paul Weller's got 'em, and so does Celine Dion and I bet even Red Crayola). They're disposable, too. That's why Stephin Merritt can write 69 of them in one sitting. But this new Arab Strap record makes Merritt's not unsubstantial accomplishment look like "Hey, Mom! I finished the Rubik's Cube!" Arab Strap make me feel like the be-pimpled teenager with pictures of Morrissey on my wall that I never got around to being. Often with love songs you might say to yourself, "That's so good because it sounds just like me," but what you mean is, "That's so good because it's how I wish I felt." With The Red Thread, Arab Strap deliver a mere 10 love songs that make me quiver - not because they're just like my life, but because they are definitely Arab Strap's lives.
We desperately wish that love felt like the seamless ecstasy of Samantha Sang's "Emotion" or Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." We wish that it would have the hokey heroic New Jersey narrative of Bruce's "Thunder Road" (at least I do). We wish we had game like Led Zep's "Out on the Tiles" or Jay-Z's "I Just Wanna Love U." Or we wish we could tell someone to fuck off like Whitney does in "It's Not Right but It's Okay." We wish we had the words at the perfect time; to make it all right, to make someone follow us to the ends of the earth, or just to end it forever. We can take solace in Arab Strap, though. We have them for the jokes we can't finish, and the words we'll never get out.
CHRIS RYAN
Splendid
Though it is perhaps Arab Strap's best and most interesting record yet, The Red Thread shows the limitations any artist will face when presenting a stance that seems destined for moral crisis ("And on the way over I swore to myself/ I'd fuck whoever I please"), but never achieves one. Lou Reed scored wonderfully with his song "Mad" ("I know I shouldn't a had someone else in our bed/ But I was so tired, so tired/ Who would think you'd find a bobby pin?") because the rights and wrongs of behavior were vividly layed out. In Arab Strap's case, Malcolm Middletown and Aidan Moffatt's vocals seem too deliberately sleepy to give weight to the desires -- to make a woman once more become part of the scenery, or to acquire "a world of opportunity" by completely dissolving a relationship -- and inevitable, if mild, consequences that drive their songs.
In a rewrite of a classic Animal House sequence, Arab Strap's songs would have the angel yawning as the devil yells for the frat kid to "fuck her". Such a stance would strip the scene of humor, or of any real human emotion, and that's the problem at the heart of Arab Strap's work. Their aims are to present a Jim Thompson-like world, where contentment ("At least we know we're fuckable/ At least we're sated and we're tired/ At least the bedroom stinks/ An we know we're desired") is cheap, and where the state of one's disinterest (always evoked by the band's vocals) determines one's "cool".
The one exception to this seems to be the smart and lyrically simple "Haunt Me" ("If she's all I need to love and breed/ Then haunt me/ 'Cause I know you'll keep me in tow"); besides being more verbally direct, the band's nonchalant sleep-sing cannot keep the soaring orchestration from bringing ample drama to the moment. The resignation and acceptance of love should be a fairly poignant moment, and gladly, it's not wasted here.
Musically speaking, one might object to the programmed drums on "Last Orders" and "Turbulence" -- songs about sex deserve organic instrumentation -- but the sound is otherwise sublime. Every instrument gets a moment to shine, with the guitars shifting in and out of the sheets that are washed in the songs, and Barry Burns' piano work lighting up "Amor Veneris" like a cigarette. Yes, then, Arab Strap are a terrific band, with possibilities that seem infinite. Still, I am certain that the songs on The Red Thread could have been better if the group had bypassed its trademark vocal style and actually played along with the lyrics, singing as if something in the lives of its characters were at stake. There is simply too much going on in these songs to have one leave The Red Thread, as I do, feeling empty of emotion, on a stranger's bed, wiping up some stranger's "million little me's" (sic).
THEODORE DEFOSSE
Dotmusic
Now back in the bosom of Scotland's independent scene after an ill-fated dalliance with a London major, the Falkirk miserabilists' fifth album is really more of the same - Aidan Moffat's social-realist poetry over distinctly measured backing led by Malcolm Middleton's obsessive manner with a guitar arpeggio. Really by now, you'll be aware whether you find such things entrancing or annoying, though it's certainly true to say that 'The Red Thread' is a huge improvement on the disappointing 'Elephant Shoe'.
Playful is hardly the word you'd associate with the Strap, but it's certainly applicable to parts of this album. Single 'Love Detective', with its clumsy but very effective programmed beats, like some kind of eighties throwback and the equally cheap sounding, electro-fashion disco drum machine of (overlong) closer 'Turbulence' are hardly the stuff of gloom. Not that there's none of that - the sample-led 'Haunt Me' could be positively pretty in other hands, but here just sounds sinister, and the agonising restraint of 'Screaming In The Trees', just an electric guitar, voice and keyboards, never lets go, becoming more effective for it.
But though the music is as good as anything they've ever done, rarely resorting to that downbeat, drunk-in-pub-tells-his-life-story tendency they've too often made their trademark - only the opening track 'Amor Veneris' fits that description, almost at odds with the rest - the lyrics are way below Moffat's usual standard. 'Love Detective' - man reads diary, finds out things he doesn't want to know, does his own head in - turns the exceptional into the commonplace, so drab is the language.
'Haunt Me' meanwhile says less than some graffiti manages, and much of the rest just details a frankly ordinary sex life. It's puzzling. Perhaps he's trying for the Literary Review's famed 'Bad Sex' Prize, awarded to the writer who least skilfully evokes the act in prose.
Though Arab Strap will always be something of an acquired taste, this generally imaginative and well-played record, which easily pisses on the turgid confessional likes of Tram and their tepid ilk, is too often let down by their own distinct voice.
Time to write that novel then...
STEPHEN JELBERT