If there was a soundtrack album to the Blair Witch Project, it would be the new Arab Strap opus, Elephant Show. Bleakly lo-fi and ever-so-spooky, this record crawls rather than spins around your dansette and every so often you throw nervous glances in the machine's direction, fearing that it may have been possessed by the devils of miserable, urban underground blues music. If Tindersticks make music for the bedsit, Arab Strap make it for the squat - as you develop an addiction for cheap glue.
It shouldn't surprise you one jot that the band come from Falkirk, "a shit town lying in the barren land twixt Edinburgh and Glasgow", as they say themselves. As an international, jet-set, access-all-areas rock scribbler, I've had cause to tumble down what passes for Falkirk's Main Drag at club/pup chucking-out time on a Saturday night - and it makes the Apocalypse look like a scene from the Teletubbies. Scary.
"On offer in Falkirk," say the band, "is a bowling alley that no one ever goes to, a Laser Quest and 12 pubs of which only three are ones you'd wish to set foot in." It is in these urban dustbowl surrounds that the band, Aidan Moffat and Malcom Middleton, draw the inspiration for their music - all tales of love-gone-wrong and true-life confessions from the bottom of the glass.
The two came together through a shared love for the music on Chicago's Drag City record label (Smog, The Palace Brothers, Kajagoogoo, etc;) and they took their name from a sex toy that they saw advertised in a (stolen) magazine. After being spurned by Domino, the UK licencees for Drag City, they were signed up by Glasgow's Chemikal Underground label (home to Bis and a few other pop weirdos). The first single, The First Big Weekend (which is now quite collectable) featured a lyric about what the band were doing on the weekend that Scotland lost to England in the 1996 European Championships. The song was later to be used in an TV advertisement and, being a tad idiosyncratic, the band now refuse to play it live.
Their first album, with the Smithsesque title The Week Never Starts Round Here, was a fabulously gloomy and minimalist affair. With rawer-than-raw lyrics and a sparse rhythm section, this was "mood music" taken to a new extreme. The next album, Philophobia (the fear of love) actually made it into the Top 40 of the Hit Parade as more and more people realised that Arab Strap's music had that ability to speak starkly and directly to a populace sensitised by Britpop and teenbop rubbish. "No one really writes honest, spiteful love songs," says Aidan Moffat. "The kids never hear it like they should hear it. They should know of the pain."
The major labels, trying to cash in on the new anti-star, anti-gloss dollar, all winged their way up to Falkirk to try and convince Arab Strap that truly, their future did lie on the cover of Smash Hits magazine; but all were turned down, with the band eventually jumping ship to Portishead's record label, Go! Beat.
And now for Elephant Stone, which the band, rather hilariously, describe as a "more optimistic" album. The songs here demand to be listened to, and not just because they are a perfect antidote to the Happy House triteness currently cluttering up the charts. They are blood-soaked, drink-ridden, headache-friendly odes to a side of life that most people prefer to edit out of their experience. Get down with Arab Strap - you won't regret it.
Elephant Shoe is on the Go! Beat/Universal label. Arab Strap play Dublin's HQ tonight, Sir Henry's in Cork tomorrow and the Liss Ard Festival on Sunday. Bring your own angst and paranoia.
