Review: Arab Strap bridge old and new at Lemon Tree show on August 18
DURING a gig at Aberdeen's Lemon Tree on Thursday, August 18, Scottish indie veterans Arab Strap perfectly married their oldest and newest takes on sex, excess and the disappointment of domestic life.
It is a profound mistake to call Arab Strap depressing, despite first impressions.
Spend time in their music's apparent wasteland of spare instrumentation, synthetic drums and frontman Aidan Moffat's Falkirk drawl and you will find an addictive blend of explicit poetry and humour, which is always sympathetic to the listener's failings.
Though starting their career as chroniclers of New Labour Scotland's pointless overconsumption, 2021 album As Days Get Dark looks at the effect of ageing on their perennial topics of hedonism, sex, romance and everyday struggles.
Arab Strap's Lemon Tree visit drew from both of these sources, setting up an evening of communal catharsis for the packed crowd – which attracted the same number of students as older punters who were around for their earliest work.
First, though, support act Edinburgh singer-songwriter Callum Easter showed incredible bravery by taking stage with an accordion strapped to his chest.
Next to him was a large pile of analogue synths and sequencers and he was underlit by a pulsing strobe light.
Despite plenty of early funny looks, Easter seized the room by unleashing his gorgeous Scot-soul voice.
Finding the right support act for Arab Strap can't be easy – so Easter's huge-sounding multi-instrumental heroics was an inspired choice.
With tunes feeling like great, unheard 60s soul songs trying to burst out from the unusual treatment Easter gives them, he made the crowd buy into his eccentricity and slinked off in victory after a short set.
The core members of Arab Strap are Aidan Moffat and guitarist Malcolm Middleton, but play live with a classic backing lineup.
First tune The Turning of Our Bones benefited from this reinforcement, with shambling zombified rhythms selling the lyric's tale of intimacy and connection in spite of ageing and decay.
Throughout their set the band weaved old songs in with new tracks, as they followed their first song from their 2021 album with a mid-tempo headbanger from 2003 album Monday at the Hug & Pint.
With an unpublishable title, the song charts a man's feelings of paranoia and self-destruction around women, as he convinces himself that: "they've seen me searching a stranger's house for dregs."
The music soundtracking this breakdown was shockingly powerful in the small venue, particularly during the symphonic middle-section.
One of the set's centrepieces, 90s track Girls of Summer, continues in the same vein but with a more anthemic accompaniment backing up a sketch of pointless warm weather intoxication that is grim but punctuated with positivity.
Moffat speak-sings that: "I don't think I'll need a jacket" and "it'll still be light outside when we leave the pub" before a cacophonous middle section and the glorious appearance of a bumping trance loop.
After another track from As Days Get Dark, Moffat said to the crowd: "Let's take it back to the 90s, one of the worst decades ever.
"Don't believe what they said – it's a much better world now.
"Well, apart from the Tories.
"Ah but I suppose you lot quite like them up here, don't you?"
New Birds, from 1998's Philophobia, is a heartbreaking track that drops the listener into a scene where a man is tempted to cheat with an ex-lover.
With the drummer switching to orchestral beaters for cymbal swells, and a pretty, spare guitar line, Moffat is captivating in his storytelling.
The listener is left in suspense until nearly the last moment, until the lines: "But you can't remember how she kissed.
"And now you've got the chance to find out.
"But you have to remember there's this other kiss.
"She's at home, wondering where you are and what you're doing."
A massively cathartic moment, the song's closure visibly touched the audience, some of whom had probably been tempted themselves during the heady 90s.
As Days Get Dark was the first album since the breakup of the band in 2006, so the gulf between the two periods of the band's work is significant.
But the live band gives a solid edge to old material and adds the human touch to more-produced new work.
Around the mid-point of the set, Moffat said: "How are you keeping, alright?
"Any excitements? Any jokes, requests, any insults?
"I take that back, no insults please.
"But don't be shy, it's a Thursday night in Aberdeen, come on."
The back-to-back combo of migrant crisis allegory Fable of the Urban Fox and The First Big Weekend is the perfect demonstration of the split between new and old work.
Introducing the Fable, Moffat said: "This is a song about foxes, specifically foxes that don't come from the UK."
Taking the story of urban foxes, forced from their natural environment by hunting and poverty and meeting harsh conditions and poverty in the cities to which they flocked to represent the plight of migrants today, the track shows how Arab Strap's work has shifted to more universal topics, away from the self-centered approach of early work.
Anthem The First Big Weekend tells the story of a typical 90s night out to the backing of sombre folk guitar.
Starting off at a depressing workplace quiz, the song is swept up by a pounding 4/4 bass drum, which draws you into the beer and substance-drenched tale of traipsing through the central belt on an endless summer session.
From first line: "So that was the first big weekend of the summer", the crowd knew exactly what was coming.
The familiar story touched the students present in the same way as it did the older generation who had already (mostly) graduated from oblivion-seeking.
Closing out the show with an encore from Moffat and Middleton alone, with vulgar, funny classic Packs of Three and confessional The Shy Retirer, the audience ate up Arab Strap's radically open and powerful music.
The pair can rest easy knowing that the Arab Strap family, living while being whipped into bitterness and frustration over domestic, mortal and political tides over which they have no say, felt understood.
Leaving the Lemon Tree that Thursday night, nobody among the ranks of the initiated left thinking that Arab Strap are a depressing band.
Full Setlist
- The Turning of Our Bones
- F******* Little B*******
- Girls of Summer
- Compersion, Pt. 1
- New Birds
- Here Comes Comus!
- Don't Ask Me to Dance
- Piglet
- Blackness
- Screaming in the Trees
- Bluebird
- Fable Of The Urban Fox
- The First Big Weekend
- I Would've Liked Me a Lot Last Night
- Packs of Three
- The Shy Retirer
