ARAB STRAP THE RED THREAD ALBUM CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND RELEASE: FEBRUARY 26, 2001 REVIEW: MARCH 27, 2001

"Tainted Love". It may have been Soft Cell who brought those words out to the world, but Arab Strap personify them. Tainted love, and perhaps even more, tainted sex.
Four albums into their career, and singer Aidan Moffat still seems to have an infinite amount of sins to get off his chest, and the music is his confession booth. If the porn jazz of single "Love Detective" made you think Arab Strap had gone all upbeat on us, it will only take a few seconds of album opener "Amor Veneris" to make you think again.
Their last album "Elephant Shoe" was like one drunken whisper, quiet, restrained and staggering. Compared to that, "The Red Thread" is both more direct and more experimental. But just as wonderfully miserable.
Moffat half-sings about suffocating relationships, bad sex, drunken sex, sex with the wrong person, jealousy, alcohol, guilt, and any of the above in combination with the other. In contrast, the music is beautiful, especially Malcolm Middleton's vibrant, lingering guitar, but can also be threateningly dark. Just listen to the ghostly, haunted cry of the noisy dub echoes of "Last Orders".
Much of Arab Strap's strength lies in their way of letting the small gestures do the most of the talking, while suddenly juxtaposing them with more orchestral movements. And the way a grandiose piano enters "Amor Veneris", just to be faced with Moffat singing unglamourous lines like "It's best in the morning/When we know it won't be rushed/So leave the curtains closed/And come back when you've brushed" is perversely humourous.
Arab Strap is one of the few pillars of deep misery there's left to lean on, for us who have thought that The Cure's latest albums have been a bit thin and can't stand the contrived melodrama and selfconscious pompousness of the goth scene, and that makes them invaluable.

KRISTOFFER NOHEDEN