Arab Strap
The Week Never Starts Round Here

THE REVIEW

On your copy of "The Week Never Starts Round Here" there was a decent layer of dust, and somehow that made you quite happy, it was a good sign. But for a few days now it's been wiped off completely, the CD has been back in the player after a long time, and you have come to the realization that it is truly over. So it's just as well to write a few lines to sublimate the frustration and guilt.

A sort of concept album about the transitory and inherently failing nature of every romantic relationship, upon reflection "The Week Never Starts Round Here" is an irredeemably "ugly" record, in the aesthetic sense of the term: improvised, inconsistent, and cacophonous, filled with an indolence that would have depressed even Bukowski. A shocking debut record.

Love, as we have become accustomed to calling it, is stripped of any romantic embellishment, and everything is reduced to relationships between men and women made of irrational outbursts, affections, grudges, silences, and misunderstandings. And sex: that "dirty", sudden, and passionate one, and the much more frequent, mechanical, and habitual one.

Perhaps before then, no one had set this whirlpool of situations to music in such a raw and immediate way; Arab Strap would do it from then on for ten years to come, breaking conventions and taboos. And if in subsequent albums the musical structures became more solid and complete, making the listening much more accessible, here even that aspect is missing, and everything appears terribly bare and disjointed.

"Coming Down" sounds like Mogwai before Mogwai (the two bands collaborated closely during that period, and their respective debuts are almost contemporaneous) and opens an album that is heavily influenced by post-rock atmospheres that were already in vogue in those years.
Songs that lay down the seminal structures of Arab Strap's music between pseudo-acoustic ballads ("Wasting") and the early crossovers of folk-rock, electronic tones, and noise ("The Clearing"), which would later become one of the constants of the band's work.

All conceived as a soundtrack for stories of ordinary existential squalor of a generation that has flushed down the drain myths and ideologies and lives its everyday life disenchanted in front of a wet and sticky beer counter; a rigidly male universe for which the other half of the sky represents a battlefield, sometimes rather hypothetical, for new and old conquests, which almost always turn out to be not very glorious, especially after achieving them. A lucid awareness of how improbable feelings are, among the sensations crowding in as you bury your face between a woman's legs or in the bittersweet discomfort of premature ejaculation. The apology of a life philosophy that seems to find a moment of serenity only in the practice of idle fooling around for its own sake ("The First Big Weekend"), made of stray wanderings and collective alcoholic devastations; that deliberately shuns any assumption of responsibility, whether it be an accidental pregnancy ("Kate Moss") or preparing a drink that is too exotic ("I Work in a Saloon"). That sordid side in each of us that we fool ourselves into thinking we have tamed forever, but which then takes over again when we are left alone with the shards of an ego to piece back together.

"I'll walk through this world making little girls happy. But not you, no, not you". Perhaps just silly poses from improbable ladies' men: but we all know how, in certain moments, they do good to the soul and one's wounded pride.