“Sex and death seem to be my eternal occupations,” mused Aidan Moffat in 2020, shortly after his band Arab Strap released their first new music since reforming in 2016. While he was referencing excellent seventh album, 2021’s As Days Get Dark, and its songs about ancient death rituals (The Turning of Our Bones), online porn addiction (Another Clockwork Day) and polyamory (Compersion Pt 1), he could have been referring to any of his and Malcolm Middleton’s caustic back catalogue.
Formed in Falkirk in 1995, Arab Strap – named after a sex toy, and not, as some people assume, the later Belle and Sebastian song that references the band – amicably split in 2006, leaving a collection of post-rock monoliths that would go on to influence fellow Scottish bands such as Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad. Billed on As Days Get Dark’s Tears on Tour as “the opposite of a comedian”, Moffat’s half-spoken, half-sung lyrics are often simultaneously candid, confronting and wry, while Middleton’s accompanying lo-fi soundscapes flit between eerie and oddly comforting.
