I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore ROCK ACTION
8/10 Scottish duo’s second post-reunion album offers rich ruminations on midlife angst and online rage.
DEEP into a second-act comeback that began in 2016, Falkirk’s poet laureates of sweary lth are now 50-yearold family men and prolic, prize-winning, kelpie-sized xtures on the Scottish cultural landscape. Indeed, Aidan Moat and Malcolm Middleton are in danger of becoming national treasures, albeit national treasures who write hilariously bleak confessionals about outsized cocks, sordid carnal obsessions, apocalyptic hangovers, degrading online porn and the inevitable decay that consumes all human esh. Thankfully, middle age has not mellowed the duo too much, just lent an extra world-weary wisdom to Moat’s selflacerating, brutally honest lyrics and Middleton’s increasingly rich, eclectic compositions.
It may be ippantly titled aer a text sent by the duo’s live drummer, but I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Any More is a serious and complex album, with lyrics that dig deep into toxic masculinity and the unkindness of strangers. Billed as an angrier record than
As Days Get Dark from 2021, it is certainly not short on inammatory subject matter. A key target of Moat’s rage here is the horrorshow of online discourse, particularly the misogynistic trolls and hate-driven edgelords who lurk in the digital darklands.
This rich theme kicks o the album with “Allatonceness”, a hairy-knuckled beast of a tune full of clobbering drums and burly, snarly guitar. Here Moat slips easily into visceral disgust mode, railing against the groomers, griers and entitled fanboys who have all “done their own research” while “Nazis and rapists sell merch”. The sting in this grim fairy tale comes when Moat’s semi-autobiographical narrator reveals that he too is addicted to this online gladiatorial shitshow, a slave to the algorithm, just like millions of us.
The bristling, percussive funk-rock belter “Sociometer Blues” casts a caustic eye on our love-hate relationship with social media, imagined here in sentient terms as a soul-sucking emotional vampire: “You take all my time, you take all my strength, you steal my love/you are the worst friend I ever had”. Meanwhile, internet demons of a dierent sort haunt the album’s ironically upbeat lead-o single “Bliss”, whose female protagonist is bullied online by a shadow army of “cowards under camouage”. A gleaming, rave-adjacent, electro-pop banger with the dark heart of a serial killer, this is Arab Strap at their most nuanced and novelistic.
Another key lyrical theme here is the postcovid emotional landscape, with Moat musing ambiguously on lost connections, faded friendships and the grim obligation of renewed social contact. Over a soundbed of grumbling electro-folk, delicate piano ourishes and pointedly ignored voicemail messages, the lugubrious narrator of “Summer Season” hankers wistfully for the enforced solitude of the pandemic: “Sun is shining, let’s pretend/my lockdown didn’t end”. Shiing from tragicomic to purely tragic, “Safe & Well” is a nger-picking acoustic ballad narrated by a ghost. The heart-tugging lyric was inspired by the real case of a woman who died alone during the pandemic, her body rotting away for months, forgotten by friends and family.
Arab Strap songs mostly have a strong, vinegary avour, and this is a bracingly sour album over the long haul. The relentless misanthropic grind can drag in places. But as ever, Moat’s withering scorn is sweetened by beautiful poetry, tender emotion and self-aware, bruise-black humour. There are lines here worthy of Philip Larkin or Leonard Cohen (“a hundred billion neurons making it up as they go along”), plus gently craed electro-acoustic lullabies full of aching aection, notably “Haven’t You Heard”. Behind their bitterness and bile, Arab Strap still believe in love as a healing balm in a cruel world. A cynic is just a disappointed romantic, aer all.
But Moat returns to the poisonous swamp of online culture with the gloomy nale “Turn O The Light”, a thunderous post-rock number full of wheezing fanfares and downward doom spirals. The song’s timid, gullible narrator appears to have been suckered into a sinister-sounding internet cult. Andrew Tate and his monetised manosphere hellscape springs to mind, though the details are le vague: “Who needs family?/who needs friends?/why be compliant and weak?/i’ve found my people now...” The album ends as it begins, with the sampled screech of a dial-up modem, already an eerie hauntological relic of a recent but strangely remote past.
While most bands lose their creative bite in middle age, getting older really suits the whiskery despair and bleakly absurdist comedy of Arab Strap 2.0. Like ne cheese, they just become richer, more avoursome, and more deliciously mouldy with each new album. Long may they rot.