Arab Strap

The Week Never Starts Round Here / Philophobia

CD1:
01 – Coming Down
02 – The Clearing
03 – Driving
04 – Gourmet
05 – I Work In A Saloon
06 – Wasting
07 – General Plea To A Girlfriend
08 – The First Big Weekend
09 – Kate Moss
10 – Little Girls
11 – Phone Me Tonight
12 – Blood
13 – Deeper

CD2:
01 – The Smell Of Outdoor Cooking (Peel Session 1997)
02 – Soaps (Peel Session 1997)
03 – I Saw You (Peel Session 1997)
04 – The First Big Peel Thing (Peel Session 1997)
05 – Intro
06 – General Plea To A Girlfriend
07 – The Clearing
08 – Kate Moss
09 – Gilded
10 – Driving
11 – I Work In A Saloon
12 – Phone Me Tonight
13 – Blood
14 – The First Big Weekend

The albums stand well on their own, but the bonus discs are very welcome, not least because the live recordings actually offer superior versions of quite a few of these songs. The two Peel Sessions are especially lively and illuminating. On the first, the band is backed by members of Belle & Sebastian, sounding distinctly unlike their other band as they mash the distortion pedals and hammer the drums, and Moffat delivers the non-album track "I Saw You" in a straight deadpan as he talks about going to see a Belle & Sebastian show, remarking that the girl he had a crush on at the time was friends with "the girl who plays the cello." The Week Never Starts Round Here also includes a full recording of the band's first live performance, a ragged but energetic set at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, while Philophobia gives you the band's full set at the T In The Park festival from 1998.

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