Ah, Chemikal Underground records again, and more specifically, catalogue number CHEM017CD, which was the release directly before my (joint) favourite record of all time, but we'll get to that later. There's going to be a fair bit of Arab Strap on this blog eventually. Arab Strap were the fantastic pairing of musical genius Malcolm Middleton and grumpy poet lyrical wizard Aidan Moffat. Their music was predominantly sparse, Middletons wiry guitar lines over vintage analogue drum machines accompanying Moffat's spoken word poetry, with tales of debauchery, infidelity, more debauchery and jealousy, albeit, often hilarious tales of debauchery, infidelity, more debauchery and jealousy!
The Girls Of Summer EP is a strange one really, Opening track "Hey! Fever" is an upbeat cheerful piano based song with guest vocals from a male voice choir and Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian, The title track is a bass heavy groover which breaks into a dubby dance track towards the end (although does this much better on the live album "Mad For Sadness", "The Beautiful Barmaids Of Dundee" is a throwaway kind of song with a bossa nova beat, and "One Day After School" is classic Arab Strap, incredibly dark, sparse and confessional and features on their second album "Philophobia". Here's "Hey! Fever"...
Perfect description of Malcolm and Aiden! One of my highlights of this year was a virutal slow dance with Aiden at his Twitter birthday party! I do love Stuart Murdoch and I'm as partial to a male voice choir as the next man, Nonetheless, I'm not so keen on Hey! Fever. The First Big Weekend uses the chorus to much better effect ...
Yeah, I agree to be honest. This EP isn't one of their greatest. my favourite track on it is actually the title track, but the live version on "Mad For Sadness" is even better (in fact probably my favourite thing they ever did) so I'm saving the song for when I write about "Mad For Sadness"...
Perfect description of Malcolm and Aiden! One of my highlights of this year was a virutal slow dance with Aiden at his Twitter birthday party!
ReplyDeleteI do love Stuart Murdoch and I'm as partial to a male voice choir as the next man, Nonetheless, I'm not so keen on Hey! Fever. The First Big Weekend uses the chorus to much better effect ...
Yeah, I agree to be honest. This EP isn't one of their greatest. my favourite track on it is actually the title track, but the live version on "Mad For Sadness" is even better (in fact probably my favourite thing they ever did) so I'm saving the song for when I write about "Mad For Sadness"...
ReplyDelete