Arab Strap – Half Told Tales (album review)

It has been thirty years since Falkirk’s finest released ‘The First Big Weekend’;  the immediately iconic single full of summer nights and nightclubs, and they’re still taking the ‘pills for breakfast’. Admittedly now the medications are coming from a doctor rather than a guy in a car park, heart disease a greater concern than hedonism. Some bands just suit getting older.

Not that age has tempered them. Righteous rage had been replaced by the weary resignation that the world seems to be falling apart as fast as their hairlines, that all of that energy and activism didn’t really make a difference. The frantic dance-punk single ‘You You You’ is a brick wall of defiance that accepts our complicity in knowingly choosing the path of least resistance whilst battling for shreds of self-respect. ‘We’re over a barrel, but we don’t have to cheer it’, sighs Moffat through gritted teeth. 

They’re looking at right wing jingoism, at ‘men’s rights’ grifters, at a world seemingly slipping back into the politics of fear that framed so much of the eighties and wondering what our children will make of it all, not in abstract but from lived experience. ‘Be A Man’ sees them trying to raise sons in a world where manhood is a very different concept to what they grew up with, and is very genuinely humbling.

One of the great joys of the post-2016 Arab Strap is seeing them have the budget to pull off the sounds that were always in their heads; the Casio ‘trumpets’ now a full horn section. That expanded palette gives them more depth to play with, squalling techno and smooth saxophones, a rush of noise propelling them along.

They’ve always been a band who have a way of piercing through pretense, of a disarming honesty that cuts to the core of things. Perhaps that’s why it seems so natural for them to talk about aging without it jarring, they’ve never pretended to be anything other than fallible, wobbly humans, figuring it all out as they go along. Mick Jagger could never write a song about the Norwood Scale.

Half Told Tales is out now on Rock Action

Arab Strap play Glasgow Barrowland on 17th October

Photo credit: Luke Bovill