Strapping Young Arabs

Arab Strap's brooding dirges are not ideal music for manic depressives. Fresh from the subconscious of songwriting duo Aidan Moffatt and Malcolm Middleton, The Red Thread proffers more of Moffatt's disaffected soliloquies and Middleton's gothic arrangements.

Moffatt and Middleton are notorious drunks and misanthropes, and The Red Thread's material does a good job of showcasing the Scottish duo's ample dark side. Moffatt doesn't so much sing as intone his vocals, his voice a thick, drunk bass that undercuts even the melancholy of the band's easy, viscous melodies. The band's sound recalls a tighter, denser Velvet Underground. There are no choruses or anthems, only shifting shades and tones: Sirens blur into remote squalls of guitar; pianos linger over echoes of percussion.

Given that the band's name comes from a self-pleasuring device (see also: Steely Dan), an overt sexual fascination in the music can only be expected. If Moffatt is the volatile man we're led to believe he is, the romantic debacles chronicled here are a good indication of the root of his tortured psyche. "Love Detective" finds the thick-accented frontman breathily recalling the discovery of a girlfriend's twisted sex diary. Told straight-up over one of the album's most uptempo backbeats, the narrative is typical of Moffat's frankness. He finds a sex diary in one song, then wipes cum off his sheets in the next. There is no "making love," in Moffatt's world; sex exists only as varying degrees of doing the nasty. Perhaps that's why Moffatt is so dispassionate, as on the acoustic mope "Amor Veneris," the album's leadoff track: "It's always best in the morning / when we know it won't be rushed / So leave the curtains closed / and come back when you've brushed."

Hope is largely absent from these songs; the most it seems Moffatt can hope for is sleep or alcohol to drown his problems. The Red Thread's stories are of uncouplings, of the stains in the sheets, the angry post-breakup nights, the frustrated personal funks that follow raging tides of excess. It's music to wallow in, the soundtrack to bearing hours alone with the bottle. Like much of the world's greatest art, The Red Thread is both tragic and beautiful. Above all, it is a tragedy that most people have never heard it, for it is, through all its darkness, a triumph.