Listening to As Days Get Dark (that’s the new Arab Strap album), time seems to disappear all together. Which is strange, because the themes that course through As Days Get Dark are often about time passing, about bodily and spiritual decay, the harsh realities of life in late capitalist Western civilisation. There’s a deep sense of elegy and of loss through out the album, and you realise that all of Arab Strap’s protagonists – narrated by the instantly recognisable Aidan Moffat – share a lineage, a consistent narrative. If in earlier years Moffat (if it’s Moffat we’re talking about, maybe these are characters that populate his darkly humorous imagination) was hard drinking and mapping out the romantic failures that great most of us in our early adulthood, on As Days Get Dark the narrator is searching through folders on his dusty Dell laptop, reveling in memories of sexual conquests.
