Audio By Carbonatix
Malcolm Middleton is in a good mood. This isn’t a big deal, really–except that as the brains behind Arab Strap’s music, Middleton isn’t someone you expect to find in high spirits. “Bukowskian bleakness” is the term often employed to describe the mood of Arab Strap, and from their very first releases, Middleton and partner-in-crime Aidan Moffat have seemed downright eager to burrow a hole straight to living hell. Enjoyment of their previous records seemed to require either a profound misanthropy or a profound schadenfreude; either way, there was no denying the beauty in both Moffat’s lager-soaked lyrics of love abased and Middleton’s disco-beats-spell-doom instrumentation. After seven years, five albums and countless low-down-and-dirty shows, Arab Strap has earned its reputation as the Glasgow music scene’s ur-depressives. And Glasgow is not a cheerful place.
Arab Strap’s latest, Monday at the Hug and Pint, is one of the best albums of the year, even if it, too, is surpisingly upbeat. Well, sort of. Take “The Week Never Starts Round Here,” which Middleton cites as an example of the new, up-and-funny Arab Strap.
“Well, maybe it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is to me,” Middleton says, speaking so quietly over the phone that the distant, soundchecking trumpets almost drown him out. “That song, it relates to this text message Aidan sent me awhile ago. He was sitting in this pub late at night, and for some reason he typed me this message saying, basically, that nothing has really changed for us in the past seven years, except that now we go on tour and our mums don’t have to make our tea for us anymore.”
The humor of that song and others Middleton points to as “the funny ones” is of a peculiarly mordant variety. “The Week Never Starts Round Here,” for example, tallies up such punch lines as “Easy come, easy go, kiss a girl, write a song/Enjoy it while it lasts because it won’t last long.” Or consider laugh-riot opening track “The Shy Retirer,” in which Moffat sputters the aside, “I’m sure it doesn’t matter/When I eat when I’m not hungry I’m sure I feel my face get fatter.” It’s kind of funny. Kind of.
But if Moffat’s text message was accurate on some level, its message of never-ending stasis certainly isn’t true of the band’s music. Monday at the Hug and Pint is a different kind of Arab Strap album: Where the back catalog finessed all kinds of claustrophobic intensity and weirdly compelling beauty from a few tried-and-true musical strategies, Monday has real breadth–in its instrumentation, in its arrangements, in its variety of tones.
“It’s pretty much to do with the fact that we’re better at making songs,” Middleton explains, not exactly putting too fine a point on it. “In the past, we’d do a song in one or two days, not making much of an effort, and whatever came out–that was it. But I’m a better guitar player now,” he continues, “and Aidan is better at writing melodies, so I think we felt that we were ready to challenge ourselves, be a bit more ambitious.”
The shock of those ambitions only fully hits with the tracks “Loch Leven Intro” and “Loch Leven,” which–back in the days of vinyl or cassettes–likely would have marked the start of the album’s second side.
“See now, there again–that’s a song I find really funny,” Middleton notes, speaking of both “Loch Leven” tracks as one. “I mean, obviously, we’re from Scotland. But we’d never, ever done anything remotely Scottish-sounding before…really, we’d stayed about a million miles away from Scottish folk sounds. So, for me, hearing bagpipes and things on one of our records, or even Aidan’s melody, which is quite traditional also, well,” he concludes dryly, “that’s just hilarious.”
Perhaps. But more important, the “Loch Leven” songs are just plain beautiful, delicately orchestral and more open-sounding than anything even in Monday‘s first half, which largely hews to the by-now-familiar Arab Strap modus operandi of hugging programmed beats to Leonard Cohen-esque vocal melodies and occasional spitfire guitarwork with a debt to Sonic Youth. “Loch Leven,” and everything that follows it, is so musically organic, it would be bad karma to pick it apart for influences.
As with “Loch Leven,” the broader musical palette of songs such as “Act of War” and “The Week Never Starts Round Here” was adopted despite Middleton’s initial hang-ups about certain instruments.
“We’d used strings and piano before,” he says, “but on this record, we really went for it–which I was somewhat wary of doing, frankly, because it’s such a third-album cliché. You know, the third album, the one with strings. Not that this is our third album,” he continues, setting up what may or may not be a joke. “I don’t really count the first two.
“Anyway,” he goes on, “we went ahead and got Barry [Burns] from Mogwai and a jazz trumpet player and Jenny [Reeve], our violinist, plus some other people.” He sighs, as though he still has some misgivings. “Anyway, they all came in at different points in the recording, and what finally convinced me that working with all these people was right was the fact that they all would change the mood of the song. It would turn into something else–something that still sounded like Arab Strap and, at the same time, didn’t sound quite like anything we’d done before.”
As Middleton explains, Monday was also the first Arab Strap record in which the band demoed all the songs before going into the studio, and the first one in which he and Moffat had played new songs live prior to recording them. He says that having a template, combined with taking time off between recording sessions and inviting in extra personnel, made for a dynamic creative environment.
“All the best moments on all our records are accidental,” Middleton says. “Really, Aidan and I just aren’t very good musicians. So that’s the only way we get anything done.”
Now that’s funny. And speaking of funny, Middleton cites the loose recording atmosphere as contributing to the “cheerful” tone of Monday at the Hug and Pint.
“We just had fun with it,” he says, “and that energy, that sort of spontaneity is something I hear on the album when I listen to it. It’s something we’re really trying to maintain in the shows, too, because we were getting pretty tired of our shows being such fucking downers.”
Which is, in fact, one of the main reasons for the newly lifted Arab Strap spirits. When you’ve gone as low as you can go, you just can’t go any lower.
“Our last record, The Red Thread,” Middleton says, “that one was really dark. I mean, even our fans were having a hard time with it. And then we went and toured it for ages, and it was like a big depressing experience every night. So all around, we were ready to have a good time.”
