Album Of The Week: Arab Strap – As Days Get Dark 13 March, 2021
Our pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days comes from Arab Strap after the recent release of the duo’s As Days Get Dark record – here’s your chance to revisit the review and check out the album via Spotify.
“If opening up your records with some good old fashioned swears is what you’re after, then Arab Strap have form, 1998’s Philophobia beginning with the immortal line, ‘It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen’.”
“But there’s something oddly plangent about the kick-off to The Turning Of Our Bones – the Scottish duo’s first side 1, track 1 in sixteen years – one which jumps in headfirst with singer Aidan Moffat confessing, ‘I don’t give a fuck about the past’.”
8/10
If opening up your records with some good old fashioned swears is what you’re after, then Arab Strap have form, 1998’s Philophobia beginning with the immortal line, ‘It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen’.
But there’s something oddly plangent about the kick-off to The Turning Of Our Bones – the Scottish duo’s first side 1, track 1 in sixteen years – one which jumps in headfirst with singer Aidan Moffat confessing, ‘I don’t give a fuck about the past’.
Certain parts of his and partner Malcolm Middleton’s story are familiar through the history of other reconciled acts; that there was never any thought of a reformation until working together after over a decade of self-imposed drift; that they were unprepared to make artistic compromises, and that, as the line of that previously mentioned track goes, any new work had to be well distanced from what had gone before.
Turning Heads podcast to speak about their new album,
As Days Get Dark
Turning Heads speaks to Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat from Scottish indie rock band Arab Strap. Arab Strap’s new album,
As Days Get Dark, is their first in 16 years.
Arab Strap formed in 1995. Their debut album,
The Week Never Starts Around Here, arrived the following year. It was led by the single ‘The First Big Weekend’, which has become the group’s signature song, combining spoken word vocals, drum machines, plucked guitars and themes of unglamorous late-night hedonism.
They’d go on to release a total of six studio albums, including 2003’s
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“I don’t give a fuck about the past,” says Aidan Moffat, not mincing his words as the Falkirk duo’s seventh, and first since reuniting, album opens. Arab