So, Arab Strap are to be no more. The passing of an outfit that may or may not be in their prime - that may never have had a prime as such - often seems to illicit different reactions in different people.
Arab Strap hailed from a-town-nobody-has-ever-heard-of in the rainiest part of Scotland. While quite enjoying recent outings, I have a feeling Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton know their best work together is to be found in the back catalogue rather than in any future endeavours. While they were still creating perfectly workable music, it's perhaps for the best we don't see too many albums where they are simply sketching pale imitations of their former sozzled beauty.
But their break-up has sent me back to the A shelves, and I pulled out 2001's The Red Thread for another spin.
'The Red Thread' is an Eastern belief that you’re connected to your life partner by an invisible red thread and by that you will always find each other.
The Red Thread opens with the thinly stretched canvas of 'Amor Veneris', where every scrick, scrape and slide of Malcolm Middleton’s cowering guitar highlights the voyeuristic element of peering into these sad sod’s bedroom. A patient ebbing sets the low-key and patently lo-fi atmosphere, promising nothing yet delivering more.
In 'Last Orders' the music sets a scene whose finer points are brushed in with deft strokes of grey by the lugubrious tones of Moffat’s unapologetically Scottish muttering. The dreary underbelly of urban (though not at all urbane) Scotland is explored, the hollowness of the drum loop and the fizzing guitars reinforce the monotony. Damp walls, musty tangled sheets and lifting wallpaper appear as the moribund backdrop to a relationship of convenience, of drinking to dull the dullness where “we’ll get pissed just to watch the telly”.
'The Devil-Tips' meanders past in its own good time, stretched over painfully sparse and sluggish percussion and pointy pitched guitar notes. There is such a slow tempo it threatens to wisp away, to disappear into the ether that it has loosely bundled together.
Epic highlight 'The Long Sea' washes in over a ceaseless buzz, a near narcoleptic substratum that foreshadows dis-ease. A gentle riffing and slow circular build would alert any Dirty Three listener to the ominous portent it is. The nautical allusions are in abundance – the cymbal splash, stumbled tom-tom, and swaying intemperate tempo. Needless to say, it all gets a bit grisly.
Following this drainingly climactic point, 'Love Detective' offers temporary respite in the form of a loungey, Stereolabby upbeat groove. Yet in true Arab Strap style the tale and the beat sour, lose their carefree spin, grow tainted around the edges and warp. The classic territory of sexual paranoia has Moffat waiting for his girlfriend to leave the house so he can read her sex diary, in which her infidelities are documented in lurid detail.
'Infrared' works on simplicity – a miserly machine beat, a downtuned guitar tumble, a blurry bass murmur; metronomic without being monotonous, relentless rather than repetitive.
'Screaming In The Trees' finally lets in a squinty hint of light, the guitars on an upward waltz, dropping a few notes away shyly at the end as a caveat against getting too cheery. The strings slide across rather than along, the piano chooses to entwine with the flow.
'Haunt Me' is a dreamy, lush, evocative wash, as though sampled from an old Hollywood film.
By the time the album fades with 'Turbulence' you realise you’ve hardly left the bedroom, let alone the house. Yet it is somehow because of this bedsit navel-gazing, rather than despite, that Arab Strap connected.
You didn't need to spend every Friday night sticking to beer-soaked carpet and accidentally pulling the ex to appreciate this warts-and-all peek into the true heart of Britain; of life. They did the dirty work for you.
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