Now back in the bosom of Scotland's independent scene after an ill-fated dalliance with a London major, the Falkirk miserabilists' fifth album is really more of the same - Aidan Moffat's social-realist poetry over distinctly measured backing led by Malcolm Middleton's obsessive manner with a guitar arpeggio. Really by now, you'll be aware whether you find such things entrancing or annoying, though it's certainly true to say that 'The Red Thread' is a huge improvement on the disappointing 'Elephant Shoe'.
Playful is hardly the word you'd associate with the Strap, but it's certainly applicable to parts of this album. Single 'Love Detective', with its clumsy but very effective programmed beats, like some kind of eighties throwback and the equally cheap sounding, electro-fashion disco drum machine of (overlong) closer 'Turbulence' are hardly the stuff of gloom. Not that there's none of that - the sample-led 'Haunt Me' could be positively pretty in other hands, but here just sounds sinister, and the agonising restraint of 'Screaming In The Trees', just an electric guitar, voice and keyboards, never lets go, becoming more effective for it.
But though the music is as good as anything they've ever done, rarely resorting to that downbeat, drunk-in-pub-tells-his-life-story tendency they've too often made their trademark - only the opening track 'Amor Veneris' fits that description, almost at odds with the rest - the lyrics are way below Moffat's usual standard. 'Love Detective' - man reads diary, finds out things he doesn't want to know, does his own head in - turns the exceptional into the commonplace, so drab is the language.
'Haunt Me' meanwhile says less than some graffiti manages, and much of the rest just details a frankly ordinary sex life. It's puzzling. Perhaps he's trying for the Literary Review's famed 'Bad Sex' Prize, awarded to the writer who least skilfully evokes the act in prose.
Though Arab Strap will always be something of an acquired taste, this generally imaginative and well-played record, which easily p**ses on the turgid confessional likes of Tram and their tepid ilk, is too often let down by their own distinct voice.
Time to write that novel then...
