Arab Strappery

I’ve written about Arab Strap before, but then I didn’t quite understand how perfect a live album their “Mad For Sadness” is. There’s little conversation with the audience as the best of their catalog is delivered with precision, elegance, and feeling. But the whole album, as far as my listening is concerned, revolves around the achingly beautiful version of “Girls of Summer.” Delicately echoing guitar, strings, melting off into the mix only to be taken up in a hail of static and feedback just as the dreams of old lovers get too real. You only realize it’s stopped when singer Aidan Moffat croons one of his few asides to the applauding audience: “I wanna have sex on the beach,” a sure non-sequitur for anyone who wasn’t there. It doesn’t matter. These gloomy Scots have it.