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However slight it is, there's a measured optimism in some of the lyrics on the release that make the weight of things just a little easier to bear.
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It'll sit nicely at the ultra-sad end of the CD rack, but if you have to listen to it more than twice a year, you should definitely drink less, get out more and consider relationship counselling.
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Arab Strap's music is still fractured, Smog-like, and woefully beautiful. The group's pitted, narky ambience fuses Irvine Welsh with Brian Eno's Another Green World-- Elephant Shoe is ambient for the Tamazipan massive.... Arab Strap's depression is as addictive as their expression of it is alluring.
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The true strength of Elephant Shoe lies in its transcendent quality, in its ability to sweep you away with its hypnotic beauty and transport you to the heights of your own imagination.
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The trademark woeful brood is firmly intact. This time around, however, the Scottish duo has taken a slightly more playful approach to its music.
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There is undeniably something almost romantic about the duo's newfound acceptance of relationships, even if the main evolution is that they now view them as a necessary evil, rather than simply evil.
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Moffat's half-sung, half-muttered confessionals still lurch between the pulsing beats and pensive instrumentation but the tone is now more funereal than carnal.
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The recipe has changed little; if anything, it?s only become more articulate. Hauntingly beautiful backing tracks that could easily stand on their own float along, barely moving.
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Elephant Shoe recalls the somber tranquility of Velvet Underground at its most remote.
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It's some of the most depressing music ever made, and unlike The Cure you can't even dance to it, but that appears to be the point.
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Alternative PressThe tunes are as melancholy rosey as ever, the confessional as soul-stirringly honest and open. [#147, p.83]
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MagnetSomber early works by the Cure and Joy Division read like knock-knock jokes by comparison. [#46, p.66]
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SpinContinues their quest for idyllic listlessness, setting claustrophobic love-sucks songs to shy bedroom beats that are always passing (out) into ambient ether. [Sep 2000, p.189]
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