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Arab Strap make folk music. Not the touchy-feely kind. The real kind--music made by folks. These Falkirk, Scotland, deadbeats have stripped their music down to its barest bones, crisscrossing spoken word and music to reflect the bleakness of the refinery town they hail from. A strumming guitar drifts out of one speaker while dark, disaffected poetry about sad, drunken nights and lost chances with lost girls issues from the other. Starkly honest, the lyrics slowly burn like cigarettes left on a mattress as they describe murky sexual encounters and the grim face-offs that follow. It's downer music, but it's so elegantly conceived that it engages a wider band of thought than simply sadness. The album's centerpiece is the trip-hoppy "The Clearing," a slow, sexy lament with piano and cello contributions from Chris Geddes and Isobel Campbell from Belle & Sebastian. "And now the things that used to turn me off, I find endearing / And they laugh behind the trees and she lays naked in the clearing." This is what life sounds like.
--Lois Maffeo
