Arabic strap
I'm fine with that, don't screw it up anymore
Rock Action
09 May 2024
Issue #72 – The '90s Issue with The Cardigans and Thurston Moore
The ancient bleep and buzz of the dial-up opens and closes Arab Strap's eighth and perhaps best album. These libraries serve to humorously delineate the online realm that much of this record resides in, while also nodding to the age of its creators.
It is a brutal, painful record in which everything is lost, ugly and hopeless. It's also beautiful and funny. On the stunning 'Allatonceness', Aiden Moffat spits venom on 'Antagonized fanboys / While Nazis and rapists sell merchandise', a ferocious, metallic post-rock buzz that serves as a backdrop for a narrow-minded assessment of an ultimately corrupt culture.
“Summer Season” reverses the joy implied by the title, Moffat as Leonard Cohen with a four-pack of Special Brew: “The sky is empty, the sky is blue / That's how I feel.” Setting fire to the present, lamenting the loss of youth, it takes a musical hook and backs it up with “I'm gone, but I'm happy here.”
The loss of a lover, described both in the language of a written message and in physical presence, is mourned in “You're Not There,” while the loss of the narrator's life—lonely, unnoticed, and unforgettable—is hauntingly described in the devastating “Safe & Well .”
“Strawberry Moon” sounds sweet, bass that bruises and becomes strangely refreshing, the New Order scribbles in the gutter, Sufian Stevens sinks into a bar-boudoir bottle of punch.
These are pop songs, in a way, memorable, melodically awesome at times, but powered through a relentless mix of misery. When we get a glimmer of light on “Haven't You Heard” (“I'll be by your side / Don't let zealots and fools divide you”) it's a soothing relief.
“Turn Off the Light” closes the album with our narrator seemingly radicalized or at least warped by their newfound “community” — “Who needs family, who needs friends? / Why be compliant and weak? / I found my people now, we won't bend / We won't turn the other cheek.
With Malcolm Middleton's wistful guitar at their heart and the predictable self-awareness that characterizes their best work, this is a set of songs that doesn't offer answers, but observes circumstances and behavior plainly and poetically in turn. It is punishing in its melancholy, wry in its humor and surprisingly musically triumphant. “Your thoughts and opinions are not your own,” Moffat declares on 'Sociometer Blues' and feels, like this album, that it's something we all need to hear. (www.arabstrap.scot)
Author Rating: 9/10
from our partners at http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/im_totally_fine_with_it_dont_give_a_fuck_anymore_arab_strap
