Arab Strap – As Days Get Dark (Rock Action)

Arab Strap explore the darkness of human exploits on the wistful and polished As Days Get Dark, their first album since 2005

My love affair with Arab Strap began in 1995, a muddle of new-found university friends from Falkirk and a discovery of Scottish kitchen sink drama conveyed through the medium of fuzzed up guitars and thoughtful percussion. Arab Strap were Belle and Sebastian after the event; the dry-throated provocateur who forgets – or refuses – to leave once the sparkle has gone out.

Glasgow in the 1990s constructed an almost unparalleled tower of confessionalists. Arab Strap, from the very firstlings of “The First Big Weekend”, have seduced audiences with the everyday turned extra-ordinary. A Wolfian concept, the original Strap recordings were done in Malc’s bedroom, a genuine bedroom enterprise; the songs were frank, raw and very Scottish.

At a time when Scottish bands singing in their Scottish accents were making it on the TV – Bis being the best example of wowing a newly-forgiving international audience – Arab Strap began to find a footing.

I won’t forget the basement gig in Nice n Sleazy when Aidan told everyone to be quiet and just listen, in slightly less salubrious terms, under threat of being unceremoniously removed; nor the Primavera Sound show 20 years later when the sun came down on the most accomplished performance of the festival.

They’ve squabbled; they’ve argued; they’ve collapsed and turned the backwards cymbal in on itself. But they’ve always remembered to collect their jacket at the end of the night.

As Days Get Dark is their first album since 2005 and it has a distinctly different – yet utterly familiar – feel to their previous work, like slipping on a new pair of your favourite brand of trainers. Back working with producer Paul Savage, it comes amidst lockdown desperation: we’re all looking for the new from the old. Comforting ourselves with what we know. One thing Arab Strap are good at is making the awful feel acceptable. The stripped-down feel to a lot of the album is classic Arab Strap, and the loops, strings and clever guitar riffs are there, but with an addition at times of a more retro sound in the synths and even the odd bit of sax. The aging of the band brings something more wistful, more polished.

The first single, “The Turning of our Bones”, opens the album with a brooding, darkly triumphant homage to aging disgracefully. Aidan proclaims “I don’t give a fuck about the past”, and the whole song feels like one finger up to the years marching by. As always, there is achingly-touching attention to detail and evocative word-play. The chorus is exultant – “Dig us up and hold us high!” – and a reference to “the second life” brings echoes of Edwin Morgan’s glorious optimism.

Continuing this theme of change is “Another Clockwork Day”, where pleasure is derived from searching for the past through images, “buried in folders within folders”. Aidan’s ability to play with language adds a level of wry humour, looking at his subject “wearing nothing but a new postcode…”, and the song’s satisfying conclusion – “In the almost dark, she’s hardly aged a day” – reminds us that losing our youth does not mean losing our love.

The album traverses the darkness of our exploits, a common theme for Aidan, where we are faced with “the ghosts of indiscretion and lust” (‘Kebabylon”). The listener is unable to turn away from their own awareness of the effects of the years slipping by – memory disappearing, tears flowing at the realisation that memories are only that – yet each memory feels cast in (tarnished) bronze. Aidan deals with the emotions it all brings in “Tears on Tour”, the flippantly alliterative title masking the serious reflection within the song.

“Here Comes Comus” introduces another figure of myth. The album’s lyrics are full of such references – Comus, Bacchus, (Ke)Babylon – reflecting the idea of not only looking back to bygone days, but also the concept of glorious past and of the relevance of mythology. The rebellious nature of such figures, their celebration of excess and indulgence – it feels fine at the time but ratchets up regret (and don’t we all know that feeling?).

The cast of characters widens with the Urban Fox (an allegory for immigration and violent xenophobia); the Weak Man and the Sleeper. These are men who move in the darkness, illicit and illegal, drinking their way through life, barely able to glance up beyond the tunnel of their own desires. Life feels desperate, people without a place – “the sinner’s life decides his demise”. What else can we do but “keep on rollin”? Sage advice.

The closing track, “Just Enough”, sounds like a cycle back to the opening musically, but as if the fight’s gone out of it. It’s full of dark imagery, the violence of love, though Aidan realises, “if you never hurt, you’ll never heal”, and this sentiment seems to be a fitting resolution. It is a “call for love without a sound”, and this seems to be the over-arching message: love will be the only way through.

The days are dark, the night is long, but we will endure.

Arab Strap go on tour in the UK in September