You’ve got to admire their honesty. Usually the new album PR cycle means disavowing your previous release(s), calling it a great step forward and essentially reinventing yourselves as the modern, short attention driven span process demands. Not so for Aidan Moffatt and Malcolm Middleton, who after thirty years of on-off music making together have decided to position Half-Told Tales with a refreshing honesty; it’s the album neither of them wanted to make.
As you double take, some quick background for beginners. Birthed in Falkirk during the mid nineties, their first run as a partnership eventually came to a hiatus after 2005’s The Last Romance. Solo careers followed, but eventually the two reformed to produce As Days Get Dark (2021) and I’m Totally Fine with It Don’t Give a Fuck Anymore (2024). This third chapter is they’ve revealed something of a compromise, a middle way between their mutually exclusive tastes and ideas that in essence has meant a finished product neither would’ve made on their own.
If that sounds like a recipe for chaos, long term fans can breathe easy. Moffatt’s lyrical self flagellation – whether in character or not – and willingness to go where few others will go by examining toxic masculinity, far right demagogues and the industrial-vanity complex is executed with a bleak and acerbic skill as ever. In places laugh out loud funny (Glamour Magick), huggingly poignant (Be A Man) and oddly hummable (You You You), for a record they’re supposedly not happy with Half-Told Tales is Arab Strap at their familiar, still vital best.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 