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Arab Strap: Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middelton
Photo: Kat Gollock
Album of the week:
Arab Strap - "As Days Get Dark"
Attention, the bad-tempered men are back, older, bearded and grimmer than ever: in 2005 it was believed that Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton had set a last, adorably misanthropic memorial for themselves with their album "The Last Romance".
But now the two Scottish musicians have dragged themselves back into the studio.
Together with drummer and band intimate partner Paul Savage, who had already produced the debut of Arab Strap in 1996, they have perhaps succeeded in their best, nastiest and most sensitive album.
An amazing comeback at the right time.
Because what do you need in these days of the corona-induced resentment bourgeoisie (Sascha Lobo) and the rampant lockdown melancholy more urgently than pop, which picks you up in the darkest corners of your own measlyness?
The one who catches you in the home office slump in the acidic belching of the lowest urges, hugs you and asks for a relieving dance: It's okay, we're all in a bad mood, we're all stewing in our own, stinking juice.
How infinitely comforting.
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Cover "As Days Get Dark"
It is not without a certain irony when singer and songwriter Aidan Moffat, of all people, calls for a salsa rave and to shake out the rotten bones in the first, gently pushing track "The Turning of Our Bones".
Hadn't he just condemned such attempts at animation 17 years ago in the similarly sinister "Don't Ask Me To Dance"?
Well, you get older.
But not milder: "I don't give a fuck about the past, our glory days gone by / All I care about right now is that wee mole inside your thigh," declaims Moffat, 47, in the crude Falkirk dialect, as if it were he Leonard Cohen's cynical little brother from the north: sex-fixated, disaffected, morally corrupt, but without the cushioning piety and sacred force of Cohen or Nick Cave.
With Moffat and Middleton, truths scratched from the dregs of life always hurt a little more.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
Arab Strap:
The Turning Of Our Bones
PeterLicht:
Ibuprofen
Drake:
What's Next
AJ Tracey:
Anxious
Bruno Mars, Anderson, Paak & Silk Sonic:
Leave The Door Open
Maurice Summen:
The charging cable
St. Vincent:
Pay Your Way In Pain
Liz Phair:
Hey Lou
Jungstötter:
Massifs Of Me
Mdou Moctar:
Tala Tannam
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
For example in "Another Clockwork Day", an acoustic ballad that is about how a sentimental drip to old, pixelated erotic JPGs in the secret folders on his hard drive masturbates while his wife next door snores quietly.
It's about the decline of the male body in these laconic humorous stories, about the rising of the libido, Viagra,
self-disgust, critical oldness,
if you will.
The songs, built around the perpetually circling guitar loops of Middleton, this time also embellished with string whirring and saxophone drama, drive the listener through tormenting hours.
Arab Strap are still masters of the sweaty discomfort on the dance floor.
Their sound, something between Mogwai-Postrock, Indietronic and Slowcore, is more unique than ever in the limbo between nervousness and lethargy.
»Bluebird«, another electronically shaky morality, tells of the common black kite, fecally called Shite-hawk in Great Britain, an unsympathetic bird of prey that ambushes its prey in the bushes at night.
A real poop, then, from whose perspective Moffat paints everything beautifully black: "I don't want your love, I need it," he sums up the urgency in a depraved world;
Sex, yes, but just no affection: "Give me your love, don't love me".
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Arab strap
As Days Get Dark
Label: ROCK ACTION-PIAS
Availability: This article will be released on March 12, 2021. Pre-order now.
Sound carrier: Audio CD
Label: ROCK ACTION-PIAS
Availability: This article will be released on March 12, 2021. Pre-order now.
Sound carrier: Audio CD
approx € 13.69
Price query time
05.03.2021 5.10 p.m.
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We don't talk to anyone and everyone, we chatter with ghosts in computer windows, Moffat philosophizes about the general alienation from zooming in order - perhaps a little too banally - to land in the existential: “And who are you anyway?
Who am I anyway?
Does anybody care? "
The
cringe
factor of this
Men who stare mercilessly at the last twitch of their dwindling virility is tall, but also healing and cathartic.
At least, but not only, for members of the same age cohort.
(9.0)
Briefly listened to:
Regener Pappik Busch - »Ask Me Now«
"The audacity of the whole thing is comparable to jazz musicians suddenly playing pop," says singer, writer and trumpeter Sven Regener about his very humorous album with jazz standards by Coltrane, Monk or Charlie Parker, which he together with Element-of-Crime -Colleague Richard Pappik (drums) and Ecki Busch (piano) recorded in lockdown.
Not for specialists, but pleasantly unconscious.
(7.5)
PeterLicht - »Concrete and Ibuprofen«
Even the blind spots wake up when the Cologne Zeitgeist ironic Meinrad Jungblut alias PeterLicht leaves the sun deck for a new album.
"Technology will save us - and love too," he proclaims mockingly against his depression and lets dignified indie pop sway lazily.
The most beautiful is his ode to the "Ibus", but a little more stabbing pain would have done well here.
(6.5)
Kings of Leon - "When You See Yourself"
One could argue that the most interesting thing about the comeback of the US rock band Kings of Leon is that they are also releasing it in the NFT blockchain currency, which is popular in art circles, as a virtual collector's item, so to speak.
Ultra-modern for a rather nasty mainstream rock album.
On the other hand, there are hardly any people with this global superstar claim.
That's why it's really rare.
(3.0)
Adrian Younge - "The American Negro"
"James Baldwin hooked up with Marvin Gaye" is what the musician, hip-hop producer (including Kendrick Lamar), label founder and law professor Adrian Younge calls his ambitious multimedia project on the evolution of systemic racism against blacks in the USA.
There is also a short film and a podcast for the album with young vocals and spoken word contributions to analog soul and jazz grooves: an kind of update of Gays classic »What's Going On« for the Black Lives Matter age, that
permeates
decades of painful
black experience
.
Overloaded but very impressive history lesson.
(8.0)