ARAB STRAP
The Red Thread
(Matador)
***1/2

"See, I don't know what to do...." As expected, Arab Strap's Aidan Moffat is plainspoken and dry in delivery, skewing the heightened sense of desperation in the song "Love Detective" on the band's new Matador recording, The Red Thread. "I keep having fantasies about leaving a Dictaphone under the pillow, following her when she goes to work, and I've been lying about where I'm going just in case I can bump into her."

The record lives up to what fans have come to want from the dour Scottish duo--it's hazy and yellow-sounding, soaked in Moffat's alcoholic piss and all-consuming regret. The unevenness he displays lyrically in "Love Detective" is perhaps the record's most hopeful moment, wherein the urgency reveals an invested desire to hold an otherwise rendered end at bay. The song is the emotional center of the album. Its narrator discovers a lover's recent diary entry and learns of infidelities and errant desires within its pages. "Eventually I had to stop reading it 'cause I started to feel sick," he says.

The Red Thread is different musically, however. It's more aggressive, sexier even. Malcolm Middleton, the primary (usually sole) instrumental player in the band, treats The Red Thread with more layers of noodling and embellishment than he has explored on past Arab Strap records--most still taking place over a bedrock of 4/4-programmed drumming and repeating bass patterns, indie rock at its essence.

And, like Arab Strap's prior releases, The Red Thread is perfectly unselfconscious as it navigates emotional terrain that most reasonable, functioning people would sooner dodge than even look at. Moffat says everything that we pledge never to drunkenly "dippy-dial" and tell people. The man, in fact, has been drunk and cuckolded throughout four records, and at this stage in the game, he is a few heartbreaks shy of becoming the Scottish musical equivalent to Charles Bukowski.

The title of the record (the "red thread" itself) is taken from Buddhist theology and can be read in different ways. The physical reality of it is the ancient Chinese custom of threading red string around the waist of a bride in a wedding ceremony to symbolize an umbilical cord, a gesture of hope for happiness and prosperity. For the album's purposes, however, the "red thread" is used as an invisible connector that binds soul mates throughout time.

For all intents and purposes, the "red thread" is not a happy concept for Arab Strap. On "Infrared," Moffat wryly concludes, "At least we know we're fuckable, at least we're sated and we're tired. At least the bedroom stinks, and we know we're desired." The thread on the record is, in fact, the chain that runs directly from Moffat's trembling heart to his terrible experience; to his neck and to the gutter, which is where the real dirt--the stained, gorgeous stink of true aloneness--shows its face in Arab Strap lyrics. From within that gutter (the pubs to which he constantly refers, the beds from which he repeatedly thinks better of his past and current situations), the man realizes he is too invested in the myth of love and familiarity to stop perpetuating his instability. Simultaneously, he finds himself too addicted to the pattern of it to enjoy his squalor.

"Twenty-three years of foreplay led up to this. But sometimes I envy my friends. Sometimes I see a world of opportunity. And what if it stays out there anchored in the middle of nowhere?" Moffat asks, nearly at a whisper over a lonely guitar line on "The Long Sea." In the background a woman's voice coolly intones, "Don't go out too far." It's a warning. The song builds to climax in a thick cloud of guitar distortion. Strangely, the effect is subtle, even as it is angled to unnerve the listener, as it effectively does. The song speaks to debilitating fear, conflicted desire, and an utter sense of impotence. And perhaps, if left to his own devices, Moffat would be downright pathetic to listen to, though his sense of lyricism is impeccable. Coupled with Middleton's refined taste and compositional brilliance, however, Moffat's impotence becomes a thing of beauty. The listener is transported, carried by the melodious flow, lost in the thick of every sad story.

The record closes with Moffat, drunk, captured late at night on someone's answering machine: "It's the worst fuckin' day I've ever experienced in my entire life. I wish I was dead. And that's fucking serious. Bye." Arab Strap has been criticized for its thematic repetitiveness, and in real life there's nothing more irritating than a sour drunk, blathering in circles, seemingly beyond the point of repair. But art is not real life. And Arab Strap is a warped, sparkling merry-go-round of tragedy, luminous in its vigorous abandon.