Beauty in the boils, blisters and bunions! Let joyful misery be outpouring, as the Falkirk curmudgeons return, and, this time, there’s even hopefulness sneaking into their cynical icy hearts.

DELICIOUSLY SCABROUS OEUVRE

I love this band and don’t care who knows it, each offering enhancing their deliciously scabrous oeuvre. And they have done it again, surpassing even 2024’s Totally Fine With It, Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore, with age and all it’s associated attendances seeming to suit the duo of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, even as they tally and survey the damage incurred. But let’s pretend, in the interests of impartiality that this is just any other band from Falkirk, so as to give some balance.

FILE UNDER AWKWARD

The 3rd release since reviving the brand, there really is a sense that, take it or leave it, this is what they do. And whilst the basics of electronic beats and electric guitar remain, there is a lesser sense of fitting into any zeitgeist other than their own. Back when Arab Strap v.01 started up, nearly 30 years ago, the then tinnier technology allied them to other operations sparking up in home studio land. With most of those having now faded away, even if the studio sound is now more polished, they are never going to be mistaken for anyone else, and nobody else for them. One of a kind, file under awkward.

Aidan Moffat, whose vocal style remains largely of a disgusted recitation of his observations and reflections around a life less well lived, puts it more simply: “We always try different styles, but it always sounds like us“, adding, “the last thing we wanted to be was one of those heritage bands that just keep touring old records“. With 14 songs here, that’s a lot of new. Malcolm Middleton, who provides, most those different styles, at least instrumentally makes damn sure of that, as the duo chase frantically between the genres, now adding all the more free jazz, metal and folk to the mix of EDM and indie.

PUNISHING STONER GROOVE

I Get Noise starts with a punishing stoner groove of drum and bass, over which powerchords chicane and maniacal saxophone hurtles. More a chant than a narrative, it is a message of intent, where the direction desired is the polar opposite of the sonic maelstrom, a frenzied call for silence. Magnificent. The perfect opener to the sequenced synth motif of the recent single, which has bedded very nicely in, ta. An undoubted banger, it should be played on radios the length and breadth of the land, at least until the flourish of F-bombs that explode after the 5 minute mark. It is a magnificent beast of a song, a love song, at that. Hope at the end of the tunnel.

Be A Man is another stonker, matching a chiming piano with a piledriver rhythm, as Moffat surveys his love for his phone and social media, or seems to: “A message on my phone, my new memory is ready, so I open up a slide-show for my soul“. Tongue in cheek? Who knows; remember he is merely the narrator of the, can I call them fables. Or would have us so believe. As he croons into the chorus, it is oddly and decidedly beautiful. More self-help in under 5 minutes than any bloody wellness vid on Youtube. The saxophone invites an echo of free spirits like Lol Coxhill.

FLAMING TORCHES

Fighting For You is then a fierce nursery rhyme disco hybrid, that marches relentlessly ahead. If sung by a crowd, it would best fit a mob with flaming torches. Glamour Magick invokes some psych kosmische vibes, perhaps alongside a ghost of Mark E. Smith, grinning. Moffat drinks from a cup of decay, as he spits out his self-help regime: “I’ve had facials with cat litter, gold-plate and semen, cryotherapy’s cold, but it keeps my skin gleaming; it takes years off me“. Gape then takes us into a galling vision of what could be any of us, as soft white underbellies get softer and less well cared for. Almost a lament, it becomes a repeating clarion call of when cruel insight robs us of blind wishful thinking. Come in darkness my old friend, isn’t the half of it.

Architectural critique might seem an unusual stone to turn over, but that turned over it is, as we get regaled with a visit back to a home once lived in, and now again on sale and available for viewing. A tragic vista is portrayed, the whole as close to sentimentality as this band ever stray. But don’t tell ’em. The backing becomes increasingly dystopian. Middleton’s guitar variations now become increasingly inventive, a slow chug the colour that bathes Basic Physics, which may even be about the two old buggers themselves: “you’re so hairy I’m so bald”. Keyboards and fauxchestration fill out any gap to the horizon.

SERENADING THWARTED AMBITION

A sunnily chiming guitar pattern brightens up the sky for Sunspot. Caught on the day it didn’t rain in Stirlingshire, it is only as the metaphor unfolds that Moffat reveals the romanticism in him, usually kept so well hidden. Yes, it’s another Arab Strap love song. Dollar Park is a place in Falkirk, a walled and floral garden, a refuge, maybe, from the schemes, where the dispossessed and tourists congregate equally. It possibly isn’t a love song but will have been, once. Mr Splitfoot has acoustic guitar serenading Mott’s thwarted ambitions into the paranormal: “All phenomena cease under observation“.

After this run of almost mystical weaves between narrative and gnosticism, Ampersand again takes firmly the hand of melody, with a catchy nsfw chorus, and muttered bvs from, presumably, Middleton. As is apparent already, it is foolhardy to try and shoehorn assumptions into any of Moffat’s poetry, and it is poetry. Maybe that’s all that needs remembering, rendering my simplistic suppositions into redundancy. Fragments meanders back into memory and what it contains, or can’t, and is another of the gentler pieces here, quietly charming, really, a reassurance to not going gently. The language is as fluidly lyrical as anything Moffat has ever penned: “I carpe the diem, it just left me a bruise, I grabbed a bull by the horns, it just shat on my shoes“.

A KRAKEN WAKING IN THE ABYSS

With Beats Per Minute taking the whole set to just under an hour there is no sense of shortchanging. As Moffat says, “This time we put everything on it“, leaving no songs for later, showing off a prodigious consistency. The track itself, which begins like a kraken waking in the abyss, as Moffatt starts slowly to intone, is a thesis on time, the variability of how a life may span out differently, dependent on species. It sounds pretentious and preposterous on paper (Ed: You’re not kidding!), but isn’t, being instead near a hymn to humanity. Or life. Or time. Or the planet.

My apologies if this all reads like dancing about architecture; it isn’t easy to encapsulate the Strap. But, as I said at the beginning, I love this band. Will your affair start here?

Here’s Glamour Magick. (Don’t forget the k.)

Arab Strap: Website

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