Album: Arab Strap:

Monday At The Hug & Pint, Chemikal Underground

Arab Strap's most accomplished album so far is a Bukowski-esque trawl through the good times and hard times, low-lifes and highlights of an evening down the pub. Not that there are all that many highlights in Aidan Moffat's tales of drink, drugs, depression and domestic abuse, related here with an authentic boozy sullenness and the sudden changes of mood exhibited by drunks. The surly "Fucking Little Bastards", for instance, is directed at the dawn chorus, characterised as puritan observers of Moffat's transgressions; but just when you think the song must sink beneath the weight of his misanthropy, the mood picks upwith the prospect of further partying. Mostly, though, it's misery: in "Glue", we learn of his emotional pain at being sexually unsatisfied; in "The Shy Retirer" and "Meanwhile, at the Bar, a Drunkard Muses", we get to see why, by observing his hopeless, defeatist attempts at seduction ("There are no set rules to follow/ Just a big black gaping hollow/ That we fall into and hope that it means love"). And in "Who Named the Days" and "Peep-Peep", we observe the changes amongst his friends – one a poisonous accomplice torpedoing his potential romances; the other, alienated, honking greetings from a passing car, but not stopping. Even his bucolic escape to "Loch Leven" is spoilt: "The rain pissed down on Leven's shores/ The same rain would rain on superstores." Much of the album's appeal rests on Malcolm Middleton's arrangements, in which poignant horns, strings, pedal steel guitar and ambient noises add varied colour to the guitar and piano structures, in the manner of a Caledonian Calexico. Recommended.