ARAB STRAP - Half-Told Tales

That Arab Strap were back to stay was clear from the very moment of "As Days Get Dark", a comeback too fine, too intense to be a one-off flare-up. What we couldn't have known was that, after a first phase of their career (from the debut through to "The Last Romance" in 2005) marked by something close to shyness, by little indie-pop bedroom sketches, in this second life Aidan Moffat's broad-Scots stories would find settings that grow ever more concrete and harsh. These "Half-Told Stories" are told to us in a riot of big guitars ("Dollar Park", to name one), drum machines in full flourish and emphatic crescendos ("Basic Physics") that mark the definitive hardening of the Falkirk duo's sound - who would ever have expected an electro battle cry like "Fighting For You" from Arab Strap?

Moffat still can't stand the noise coming from the world around him, and he makes that clear right from the intro, "I Get Noise". But on this third post-reunion record, external events matter less than they did on "As Days Get Dark" and "I'm Totally Fine With It/Don't Give A Fuck Anymore", respectively the album of awakening and the album of accepting a modernity in ruin. These fourteen new songs, not all of them strictly necessary, tell of middle age, of the body's decay, of the fear for those who'll remain once we're gone.
After an alternative-dance lashing with a guitar-heavy finale like "You You You", where Moffat complains of an itchy scrotum, a bloated belly and pills not to forget to take, comes "Glamour Magick", an attack on the ever-earlier resort to cosmetic surgery, driven by a rough, circling guitar riff and acidic electronics.

The record's most delicate moment, a sort of velvety indietronica dressed with sax called "Be A Man", is also its darkest, with Moffat whispering his worries about raising a son in an age of stubborn patriarchy and the manosphere; while "Ampersand" revives the band's old fondness for acoustic arpeggios and folk inflections.
One could object to Aidan and Malcolm that 55 minutes of music is a lot, and that a meta-song like "Beats Per Minute" is a rather self-indulgent episode, but is it really worth it, given an album this urgent, this sarcastic, yet at the same time able to show us that (perhaps) not everything is lost?

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06/09/2026