Arab Strap – Half-Told Tales – Album Review
by Killian Laher

This is the third Arab Strap album post-reformation and their ninth overall.  With 14 tracks, there is a lot to digest here, but Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton sound invigorated.  It bursts out of the speakers with I Get Noise, a big brassy uptempo number.  The big poppy beat of You You You belies the sour lyrics (“I’ve got a portly paunch I just can’t shift”) and later (“Fuck these demagogues cosplaying saviours”).  There are a lot of uptempo songs here; Fighting For You is something of a stomping anthem while Glamour Magick’s “it takes years off me” line is hard not to sing along to!  Basic Physics and Dollar Park are along similar lines, the latter’s rocky guitars winning a battle with a saxophone.

Elsewhere, Be A Man and Sunsong are a bit more chilled out, moody piano ballads.  Gape has very fetching guitar patterns along with the harshest of lyrics (“he examines his excretions, the brown piss and yellow shit”) that make this anything but an easy listen.  What suits Moffat best are the spoken-word, reflective pieces like Under Offer and Mr Splitfoot, which will sound familiar to anyone who followed his solo career, or the slow yet strangely uplifting ballad Ampersand.  Later on, Fragments starts out as muted mutterings over a basic Casio beat, joined by some gloriously ragged guitar work towards the end.  The album finishes with the slow, lengthy crawl of Beats Per Minute.

Although many of the tracks are some of the most immediate the band have recorded, there are just so many tracks with so much going on that the album can be almost exhausting to digest, though it’s the most in-your-face Arab Strap album in a few years… which is saying something.  It’s probably not going to attract many new fans, but it will keep the loyal fans satisfied.

You You You