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Aug 03, 2011 By Laura Studarus Arab Strap

Call it a match made in indie pop heaven. When Slow Club asked Arab Strap member Aidan Moffat if he’d be interested in remixing “Two Cousins,” a track off their forthcoming album Paradise (out September 12), they didn’t expect a cover. However, as Aidan Moffat puts it, the band felt they’d have no choice but to do a cover.

As he tells the Quietus, “My only option was a cover, but there’s no way my voice could sing this song without sapping the fun from it. And then I remembered an old Arab Strap joke we used to make, about how we’d take someone else’s song and just add a drum machine, slow it down and make it miserable, and hey presto, it’s an Arab Strap cover. So I decided it could be fun to make it sound like a recording my old band made years ago, but I couldn’t possibly do that without Malcolm Middleton, and we’ve been professionally separated for five years now. But I asked him if he fancied it, and he did, and that’s all there was to it. It’s not an Arab Strap performance as such, rather it’s the two guys who used to be Arab Strap recording their own, informed pastiche; think of it as an extremely accurate tribute band. Like the song itself, it was good fun, but it’s not as good as the original.”

Judge for yourself below.

Aidan Moffat & Malcolm Middleton - Two Cousins 1999 by theQuietus

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