eight

57-64


Arab Strap - Elephant Shoe (Jetset) 1999


Arab Strap - Red Thread (Chemical Underground) 2001


Arab Strap - Monday Night at the Hug and Pint (Matador) 2003


Arab Strap - The Last Romance (Transdreamer) 2006

OK. So those are the rest of the albums. One thing that seems to usually hold true about favourite albums is that they tend to be the first one you hear by a band... doesn't matter if it's their first or their last. Ergo, my favourite Arab Strap album is Elephant Shoe (by the way, if you mouth the words "Elephant Shoe" to a deaf person who reads lips they will think you're saying "I Love You." So do it). I would play a few songs from this album if I had to nutshell their sound for someone: slow and deliberate but with impeccable hooks and bridges from verse into chorus. Aidan Moffat does his deadpan speak/singing and Malcolm Middleton keeps completely minimal on drum machines, bass blurbs and the occasional, relatively crushing, guitar attack. The earlier albums had the slight flaw of extended duration... with miserablist music this can snap the dramatic tension. After Elephant Shoe, Red Thread was a refinement of all things Strap: minimal and extended musical themes, the fever chart of paranoia and infidelity of each doomed relationship. Monday at the Hug and Pint showed a deviation from form... more diversity in instrumentation at least... hinting at a slight weariness with their lot in musical life. Last year, after a decade, they decided to call it a day... but they went out swinging with their liveliest and, despite my above statement, perhaps best album. The Last Romance is one of those albums that some bands would make to signal a tidal shift in their career, but Arab Strap used it as their exit from the ten years of "no exit" existentialism they'd conjured. Good work.
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NQ Arbuckle - Last Supper in a Cheap Town (Six Shooter) 2005

A play copy from a cool alt.country label in Toronto. NQ is one of those country singers who can take a tired form, the "truck left me, girlfriend died, dog broke down" genre of dustbowl opera and blow out the clichés like birthday candles. He blends the absurd detail driven poetry of Tom Waits with the down-out-and-kicked-at blues of Townes Van Zandt.
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Arcade Fire - Funeral (Merge) 2005

A little band from Montreal. I think they're going to be big soon.
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Archers of Loaf - Icky Mettle (Alias) 1993


Archers of Loaf - Vee Vee (Alias) 1995

One of the regrets you live with as a long-time music fan is those in between days where you feel the need, either economically or otherwise, to unload part of your collection. I used to have 4 or 5 Archers of Loaf albums... now I have two. I want those others back... but the label they were on no longer exists. Boo hoo. The driving force behind Archers of Loaf was Eric Bachmann... and he is still around, having released albums as Barry Black, Crooked Fingers and most recently under his own name. They sounded like a heavy band that was halfway between drunk and over-caffeinated and kept teetering between the two poles. The two guitars traded off jangly arpeggios and low-tuned washes of sound... y'know how a lot of early/mid 90s bands were called angular? Archers were angular. Bachman took Pavement's non sequitur lyric and added a rough-edge yawp to drive it home. Icky Mettle had the energy of angry school-age crushes gone wrong, whereas Vee Vee was darker, harder and weirder... but still scored a hit with "Harnessed in Slums." Anyone want to give me the other three albums? I'm waiting.