Hardly well-scrubbed or well-behaved, Arab Strap's Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton continue to make their beds with soiled sheets. With The Last Romance, though, those sheets seem soiled with tears, not the spiels from the previous night's wanton escapade. The sexual doom that characterized their previous five releases has been supplanted by cheeky-yet-self-deprecating romantic resignation. Where Moffat once quipped in distinct Scottish brogue, "it was the biggest cock you've ever seen, but no one knows where that cock has been," now he's more concerned with unrealized expectations surrounding human interactivity. "It's hilarious to think I thought by now I'd have a wife / But I've always been so desperate to give away my life,� he opines in "Confessions of a Big Brother." Still, Arab's Strap's world is a complicated one, described in one variation as a place where "there's no hope left for us," and in another as where the singer has "had the same look on [his] face for the past two lonely years." Sonically, though, the weight of the lyrics doesn't prevent the cellos from undulating delicately or the horns from blaring with brassy emphasis. They're an appropriate accompaniment to lyrics that are hopelessly erotic, and, above all, erotically hopeless.
