Roaming in the gloaming

Their first new album in over 15 years sees the reactivated Falkirk duo older and wiser, raving against the dying of the light.

Arab Strap ★★★★ As Days Get Dark

ROCK ACTION. CD/DL/LP

AT THE peak of the late-1980s’ alternative comedy boom, Arab Strap’s singer Aidan Moffat had a different idea about how the new rock’n’roll might look. He would become a stand-up tragedian, “sitting on stage in a leather wingback armchair and telling tales of woe”. The audience would dissolve into tears, sharing a grand cathartic splurge; after the sobbing stopped, there would be “100 per cent cotton souvenir handkerchiefs” for sale in the foyer.

His vision, outlined on uncomfortably numb new song Tears On Tour, was almost made flesh in Arab Strap. Founded in 1995 by Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, Falkirk allies who were drawn together musically by a love of Palace Brothers, Smog and the flintier, Slintier end of post-rock, they often seemed to flirt as drunkenly and promiscuously with tragedy as they did with the darkest comedy. Their 5am confessionals, often spoken-word vignettes of sex and self-loathing, frequently felt like accidents waiting to happen (the unsafe Packs Of Three from 1998’s Philophobia, or The First Big Weekend, slipping about on a slick of strawberry tonic wine and Merrydown cider) or accidents that had. These were songs ripped from their own emotional headlines, date-stamped snapshots of empty sex, empty bottles and unwashed sheets, long before social media facilitated 24/7 livestreams of dirty laundry.

Yet Arab Strap never quite fostered the “collective cry” that Moffat’s theoretical stage-show demanded, their songs too sourly specific, too gloweringly defensive. They called it a day in 2006 after the sharpened-up The Last Romance, the core duo holing up with their prolific side projects – Moffat’s L Pierre and collaborations with Bill Wells, Middleton’s work under his own name and as Human Don’t Be Angry. “We could only write songs of that ilk at a certain age,” said Middleton in 2013, then dismissing the possibility of a new record.

Almost five years after their 20th anniversary reunion shows, however, comes

As Days Get Dark, a record that has kept the contact details for “songs of that ilk” while clearly having moved on. It’s informed by mid-life, but creatively at least, it’s not in crisis. Moffat’s vocals are alert and precise, whether playing the Leonard Cohen on Compersion Pt I (“I come on strong with a limerick/She knocks me back with a villanelle”), relishing the words “lachrymal Niagara” on Tears On Tour, or echoing Nick

Cave’s nightmare dreamscapes on hellishly symbolic train journey Sleeper. The music, too, no longer feels at risk of bruising its shins as it stumbles next to the singer, beats steady, electronic underpinning crisp. There’s been no lightening up – all the songs are set at night, for a start – yet there’s a sense of a slight remove, a safer distance, the lyrics feeling less like they have been scrawled in wet cement or scribbled on a bus ticket on the way home from somewhere faintly shameful.

Here Comes Comus! is still full of drink, drugs and regrettable sexual acts by the bins, yet its star is, fantastically, the Greek god of nocturnal festivities (“He’s maybe wearing makeup or his tears are black”). Kebabylon casts a street sweeper as another god-like figure, sweeping up condoms and syringes so the day can continue; the atypical Fable Of The Urban Fox, a sad (if slightly blunt) metaphor for bigotry against migrants, is delivered as a straightforward folk tale.

Yet even at a remove, these are intimate, close-up songs – sometimes, as the horrid saxophone on Kebabylon sidles near, too close. Ageing, “settling down”, passing time, death: these have long haunted Arab Strap, but here, the tick of the clock sounds like a pneumatic drill. The Turning Of Our Bones, inspired by a Madagascan ritual death-dance (and The Cure), unfolds like a Hammer Horror version of Enjoy Yourself, invoking a zombie band back for one final caper, or lovers locked in a maggot-covered last embrace. It’s Moffat’s take on the metaphysical poet trying to lure somebody into bed by reminding them it’s later than they think, skull in one hand, zip in the other. “Abandon all decorum, boil us down to our essentials/We’re all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams,” he sings, before a mention of Tesco and the school run breaks the spell.

A small skull adorned the cover of The Last Romance, but there’s a memento mori lurking in every corner of As Days Get Dark. The baroque I Was Once A Weak Man is a horrible depiction of someone furtively returning home at dawn, justifying his nighttime activities with, “Well, Mick Jagger does it and he’s older than me”. Tears On Tour catches the peculiar sentimentality of middle age, undone by the poignancy of both the young and the old, Moffat crying at “The Muppet Movie/Frozen/Frozen II”. Another Clockwork Day, meanwhile, is about a man so bewildered by modern pornography (“It’s all stepmums and stepsisters now – what the fuck’s all that about?”) that he has to fire up his own personal collection in search of “something real”: files of old photographs of his partner. “IMG4564,” for example, “The Sleeping Venus in a half-painted kitchen, as hopeful spermatozoa race to an ovum’s open arms.” The guitars are sleepily conspiratorial, a surprisingly sweet testament to the triumph of real people, real life.

It’s easy to understand why Middleton might once have been sceptical about making another Arab Strap record, but As Days Get

Dark feels like an album made by a band who have been able to grow and change without compromising their bleak spirit. The hair-raising honesty of their younger incarnation might have softened, but their new confidence and control ensure these songs let a lot of life in. Stand-up tragedy might not have caught on, but as Arab Strap have always known, it’s more complicated than that.

“An album by a band able to grow and change without compromising their spirit.”