Review: ARAB STRAP -"Half-Told Tales"

Thirty years after the first single, Arab Strap release their ninth album «Half-Told Tales» for Rock Action Records

Arab Strap have built an entire career on disenchantment. Moffat who mutters the squalors of Scottish provincial bars, Middleton who builds a carpet of acid guitars under him, the Falkirk duo who for three decades have made sentimental defeat a genre apart.

«Half-Told Tales», the ninth album and the milestone of thirty years since the first single, arrives with a surprise that to anyone who knows them sounds almost heretical: here, under the usual rough surface, there is hope.

It’s not cheap tenderness. Moffat talks about children to be protected in a world that he considers to be in ruins, of price increases that don’t stop, of a news program that is an uninterrupted sequence of massacres and tyrannies, and he does so without abandoning the merciless register that we know of him.

It’s the single You You You to better condense the disc’s challenge: it starts from a base that it closely resembles Your Love by Frankie Knuckles, a filtered and warm house that seems to have come out of a Chicago warehouse from forty years ago, and over it Moffat repeats the title like a mantra until it becomes the spell he himself talks about, before Middleton throws himself at it with a guitar that undermines the groove and transforms it into something else. It’s not simply a disco piece disguised as rock, it’s a hybrid that didn’t yet have a name and that the duo rightly calls disco-metal.

The rest of the album confirms that thirty years later their sonic curiosity has not been quelled at all. Dollar Park moves on the edges of the no-wave skronk, Glamor Magick builds an infernal dance floor made of buzzes and short circuits, and elsewhere the record returns to a more familiar lexicon, splintered acoustic guitars, almost post-rock openings, which recall how Middleton remains one of the most underrated guitarists of British independent rock.

It’s a broad stylistic excursion that holds up because it doesn’t seek coherence at any cost: Arab Strap aren’t chasing a sound, they’re staging a conversation between two musicians who, as Middleton himself admits, love and hate different things and end up agreeing on a record that neither of them would have written alone.

The risk of this eclecticism is dispersion, and at certain points the album actually runs the risk: the transition from an almost confessional episode to a thrash ending like that of You You You it asks the listener for an elasticity that not everyone will want to grant, and the variety of registers sometimes ends up diluting the subtle blade that made Arab Strap what they are, the surgical observation of the petty detail.

Here pettiness often gives way to solidarity, and those who love the duo for their integral cynicism might turn up their noses at a record that, avowedly, wants to make us dance and laugh instead of depressing us.

But this is precisely the successful bet of «Half-Told Tales»: taking two musicians who have based their identity on disillusionment and asking them to write, without falling into consolatory rhetoric, an album on residual trust.

It’s an honest record, and it’s proof that thirty years after a debut single you can still have something new to say, and above all a new way to say it.

SCORE: 7.50

TO LISTEN NOW

You You You – Glamor Magick

TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY

The disc slides and works!

DISCOGRAPHY

1996 – The Week Never Starts Round Here
1998 – Philophobia
1999 – Elephant Shoe
2001 – The Red Thread
2003 – Monday at the Hug & Pint
2005 – The Last Romance
2021 – As Days Get Dark
2024 – I’m Totally Fine with It Don’t Give a Fuck Anymore
2026 – Half-Told Tales