Just looking at the booklet which comes with the new Aidan John Moffat (out of Arab Strap) CD. Opposite the page which begins, in big letters, “PART ONE: POOP”, there’s something that isn’t a disclaimer, more a claimer, I suppose. “The characters portrayed in this work are non-fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely intentional.” Moffat is one of those artists that, you suspect, it might be difficult to be friends with, let alone lovers, given the likelihood that your basest instincts and most human frailties would probably end up on a record sooner or later. For the past year or two, it’s seemed as if he’s been suppressing that instinct to expose a little, thanks to some pleasant but inconsequential instrumental records released under the predictably saucy name, Lucky Pierre. But now that Arab Strap have been put out of their misery – a band, I think, who started to become a bit boring around the time they started trying to be more of a band, and less of a spoken-word-odyssey-with-accompanying-post-rock – it seems as if Moffat can happily return to his greatest strength: droll and explicit narratives about sex and incompetence and dreadful intoxication and stains and so on. This is the gist of “I Can Hear Your Heart”, a sort of audio novel, a spoken-word narrative set to various snippets of music – mainly the sort of grainy, looped easy listening samples that are familiar from Lucky Pierre records, rather than the Slint/New Order hybrids so often favoured by Arab Strap (and in part perpetuated by Moffat’s old henchman Malcolm Middleton on his somewhat overpraised solo records). It’s not a perfect album. There’s some fairly grating mucking-about in the middle (a collapsing version of Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” is one of the more coherent snatches), and a notably poor poem called “All The Love You Need” which tries to invert a bunch of racist terms and fails, perhaps inevitably. The sort of people who actually worry about Political Correctness might find this a breath of fresh air; I didn’t. But at its best, “I Can Hear Your Heart” shows what a compelling writer Moffat remains. You’re tempted to see him as a novelist in denial, and the CD begins with a stern warning from Moffat to read the (very fine) short story in the CD booklet first. But as the highlights of the album unravel, it’s Moffat’s bleary, oddly romantic delivery which adds much to his sordid story about various girlfriends, threesomes, random shags and such. Reading that short story, “Poop”, first, you discover Moffat having a line in a pub toilet on a night out with his girlfriend and his ex. He notices a telephone number on the wall of the cubicle, prefaced by the line “For Free Sex Phone”, and feeds it into his phone, saved as “4Sex”. On the CD, it gradually becomes clear that the irate Glaswegian on the phone is the unfortunate recipient of the drunkenly curious Moffat’s 4Sex calls. I won’t give away the whole story, though it’s worth pointing out that it takes a few listens to work it out. The climax is a straight, unaccompanied tale called “Hilary And Back” which, in ten minutes, finds Moffat in stripey pyjama trousers and laden down with beer, gatecrashing a party and getting off, after a fashion, with the 16-year-old birthday girl. There’s something really poignant about the writing, and a crisp atmosphere which pulls you into Moffat’s morally indeterminate, generally slightly grubby universe. It’s the sort of track you can only imagine playing once, but end up playing again and again. It’s on again now, putting me off my writing, actually. . .

Which comeback is this again? As The Verve mooch onto the stage at the Roundhouse, I’m reminded of a night at Glasgow Barrowlands maybe ten years ago. Nick McCabe had just rejoined the band, and I guess “Bittersweet Symphony” was about to be released. The lights went down, and the impeccable DJ played David Axelrod’s “Holy Are You”. Then the band came on: Simon Jones lunging at the crowd triumphantly; Ashcroft imperious, transported; McCabe a self-effacing figure consumed with his work. Men spilled beer and hugged each other. They’re back! I’m reminded of all this because at the Roundhouse, it all happens again. Only Peter Salisbury, the drummer, appears to have aged much, and only reserve guitarist Simon Tonge is missing, spirited away to become Damon Albarn’s henchman in Blur, Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad & The Queen and God knows what else. The DJ follows Yoko Ono with Can, then takes off “I Want More” halfway through to cue up “Holy Are You”. The Verve materialise, begin with “This Is Music”, then spend the next two-odd hours playing what may well be a near-identical set to that Barrowlands show. As revivals go, it’s rather eerie: The Verve don’t seem to be revisiting past glories, merely continuing them. If there is a change, it’s a good one. The Verve’s reunion is necessarily predicated on the return of McCabe and, consequently, the band’s silvery, psychedelic side is in the ascendant tonight. This is what I always loved most about the band – I wrote a mildly hysterical cover story about McCabe for NME when he left the second time, lauding him as the band’s key figure. I guess, given Ashcroft’s subsequent humdrum solo career, I was right about that. Backed by a superb rhythm section – their airy, gravitational funk has got better with age, I think – McCabe drives the aqueous jams that were at the heart of the band’s early glory: “Already There”, “Life’s An Ocean”, “Stormy Clouds”, a transcendentally lovely “Gravity Grave”. It’s McCabe’s gift that he can switch so effortlessly from delicate, impressionistic curlicues to thunderously heavy stomp (what on earth has he been doing for the past decade?), and it’s a powerful context in which to place Richard Ashcroft, always more convincing as the holy fool than the earnest balladeer. Indeed, this music is, in places, so unanchored, it seems a miracle how this bunch of effete, tasteful hippies became a blokey institution, second-favourite band of every Oasis fan. That becomes clearer when Ashcroft straps on his acoustic guitar and relegates McCabe to a sort of background colourist. Obviously some of these ballads (“The Drugs Don’t Work”, “Space And Time” especially) remain quite brilliant, several classes apart from the mawkish gunk they influenced and which now fills the 25+ sector of British indiedom, from Coldplay on down. But by the time “Lucky Man” is rolled out for the encores, I’ve had enough of this path, and it’s a tremendous relief when McCabe puts his foot down for the “Whole Lotta Love”-style freakout of “Come On”. He’s allowed to spatter “Bittersweet Symphony” with feedback, too, after waiting patiently for a couple of lyrics while that memorable string loop asserts itself. It remains a great song, one of those occasions where Ashcroft’s everyman mysticism is alchemically transformed – by a great tune, I suppose – from platitudes into rallying cries. There’s a new song, too, “Sit And Wonder”, not quite in the featherlight class of “The Thaw Session”, which I wrote about the other week. It’s still good, though, not least because there isn’t actually much of a song there. Ashcroft reads a few lyrics from a paper, while the band lock into one of those grooves that they discovered early in their career – a way of making something cosmic out of baggy, ostensibly. Soon, though, Ashcroft puts his shades on, and McCabe loses himself in one of those unravelling, unthrusting, magnificently subtle solos at which he has always excelled. More of that, and this might really be a comeback with a future.

After living with the new Hot Chip album for the best part of a week, it feels like my thoughts about it are finally beginning to coalesce. They’re a curious band, I think: a consummate, bright pop band on the one hand; a group whose songs gradually insinuate themselves over time. What initially appears slight, eventually becomes unforgettable. I guess this is why I held off writing about “Made In The Dark” immediately. Though songs like “Over And Over” , “Boy From School” and “Colours” still loop round in my head, months after I last played “The Warning”, they didn’t lodge immediately. With a certain logic, the first song to stick from “Made In The Dark” has been the first proper single, “Ready For The Floor”. Again, it’s a sneaky little indie-pop song smuggled in under the cover of a modish electronic production. And again, it’s sat comfortably in my mind for the foreseeable future. In general, though, it seems as if the appealing frailty of “The Warning” has been covered up by a relatively heavier, dirtier, funkier sound. With a vocalist like Alexis Taylor, of course, Hot Chip are never going to be butch, exactly, but the tweeness of that last record – and for once I use the word as a positive, not as a pejorative – isn’t quite as pronounced. There’s still the sense of little-boy-lost-in-nightclub, but this time the nightclub is conceivably a bit more debauched, and the little boy has got a bit more confidence. Consequently, “Made In The Dark” kicks off with a flurry of synths that approximately replicate, as the sage John Robinson to my left just noted, the Penguin Café Orchestra, then thumps off into a cranky, but comparatively steely-eyed melange of squirts, yelps, jackhammer beats and deviously catchy hooks that goes by the name of “Out At The Pictures”. There’s definitely a desire to jar, avoid cutesiness, this time, hence plenty of migraine-frequency repetitions and a generally rougher touch to tracks like the Todd Rundgren-sampling “Shake A Fist”, the nagging “Bendable Poseable” and “Touch Too Much”, which highlights a certain kind of modernist R&B influence that’s much more comprehended and processed than most examples of indie boys with a Timbaland fetish. The latter, especially, sets itself up to be something of an irritant, but Hot Chip constantly, cleverly evade anything quite so straightforward. I must admit that, right now, this grittier strategy isn’t working for me quite as well as the softer touch of “The Warning”. But like I said at the start, with every listen, the brainy and powerful heart of “Made In The Dark” becomes more visible beneath the layers of twitch and obfuscation. I think I’ve more or less got the hang of the first half of this longish, absorbing album. But, as I write, the back end is starting to make more sense, too: the minimal, plaintive ballads like the title track, “Wrestlers” (somewhere between Aaliyah and Flight Of The Conchords, more or less) and the two poignant closers, “Whistle For Will” and “In The Privacy Of Our Love”, that sound more soulful and less affected than previous quiet moments; and some meaty, fairly rocking things like “One Pure Thought”, “Hold On” and the fantastic second phase of “Don’t Dance”. It’s out in February, I believe. Once every tune is keeping me awake, I’ll try and revisit this one.