he first time I heard Aidan Moffat slur honesty over a cheap backbeat was in a car on the way to a roadside diner six years ago. “The First Big Weekend” was exhilarating in its oddness and simplicity. Not only was I mightily impressed by the 'bedroom' quality of the music, I was also bewitched by this drunken wanker, this idiot who proclaimed his own faults and mistakes in crazy technicolour and gob-smacking detail, although I have to admit this was before I had even heard of Charles Bukowski.

The first time I interviewed Aidan four years later, apres show, he was completely twatted on flagons of alcohol. He called his old label 'Go! Beat' "a bunch of cunts" and Bill Callahan "A WANKER!" and was wondering out loud about the fidelity of his girlfriend Christy. He then autographed all my Strap records and wrote WHORE over all the ex-girlfriends featured on their covers. His partner-in-crime Malcolm Middleton was quietly watching like a time wearied guardian, utterly sober and interjecting with calm and astute observations. I might hasten to add that this was a great experience. First, because the live Arab Strap show evokes, at times, their heroes and fellow countrymen My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain, as opposed to their stripped down and studio bound recorded work. And second, because Christy was a pliant Barbie doll he had propped up on a table beside us.

So how does this shine insight on the new album? Well, Aidan is genuinely like that. When he sings about his marauding dipsomania and the opposite sex tearing his heart from his body, then stamping and twisting their heel into his hyper-sensitive organ on the squalid street, it rings true. And with the Hug and Pint, the honesty is still unflinching, still of the sort that burns out your eyes and singes your tongue. The words, despite being strained through the beer, the thick brogue and stultifying depression still jump out at a rapid rate. Lyrics like: "He makes me treat girls like shit/ He makes me want to lie to them and use them" on “Who Names the Days?” a languid and quietly beautiful trip through his fucked up psyche, asking who (is it God?) makes him do such terrible things.

Bodily fluids, as ever feature heavily: "They've seen me in the shower with shit down my legs". As well as the weather: "The rain pissed down on Leven's shores/the same rain would rain on superstores". But there's always a killing joke somewhere along the line, as manifested in lines like: "I need to get out less". And he even rhymes 'minging' with 'singing'. (Note to my transatlantic readers, minging is slang for 'dirty' or in this case 'filth-encrusted vile-shittiness I wouldn't touch with yours')

Overall, 2001’s The Red Thread was a vast improvement or perhaps a better concentration of their previous efforts, sharpened up and catalysed by their being kicked off Go! Beat and back to the filthy slums they came from (errr, actually much respected label Chemikal Underground). It has to be said poverty probably feeds the muse better.

Hug and Pint, then, serves as the holding pattern. 'Fucking Little Bastards' is practically the only radical exception, it a crushing, whirlwind of fried emotion and frenzied white noise. The slight progression of the group here is discernible with a better understanding of balancing the musical peaks and troughs (there have been Strap longeurs so appalling that they feel like mogadon is being injected into your eyeballs), but then there aren't many other places the Strap can go anyway. Perhaps they're already where we want them to be, because if you like your tunes pretty, hungover, maimed and bristling with truth, this is the only place you would want them to stay. No one does regret better.