They are, of course, the last band in the world you would allow your daughter to associate with. Because you know that one of them will get drunk and end up in the sack with her after a night on the tear and then write a long, meandering, shag-and-tell song about it, warts and all. They love the warts.

But they do it so well; with such blush-inducing honesty. They are the probably the most astute sexual politicians around; the pub being their Parliament, desire their mandate, the bedroom their Jerusalem.

Mad For Sadness, their third album, is a live recording of a gig in London from last year and represents a stop-gap between the still-superb Philophobia album and the next studio outing (about which one wonders: will the boys in the Arab Strap get their own back on Belle And Sebastian?).

Most of the songs on Mad For Sadness hail from Philophobia and, truth to tell, if you've got that you don't really need this. Mind you, the clarity and the quality of the recording is unusually excellent for a live album. This is all the more astonishing to those who've actually seen the Strap in the flesh, as it were. This reporter remembers an inaudible mess of a gig in Dublin: imagine your worst ever shag, multiply it by a thousand and you're not even close. But this album is sex on legs: the durex-centred,

'Packs Of Three', packs a punch just as strong as the album version; the open diary narrative, 'New Birds', has lost none of its poignancy or intimacy despite being recounted in front of, one presumes, several hundred people; and 'Phone Me Tomorrow' underlines Aidan Moffat's status as the tragicomedians' tragicomedian, thanks to his near-comatose deadpan delivery of the immortal line: "Phone me tomorrow when you're sober/Just to remind me that it's over."

We also get the gloriously-named Adele Bethel, one of the two girls pictured applying make-up on the sleeve art, singing the female vocal part of the, er, romantic duet, 'Afterwards', which goes down a treat. The stories those girls could tell. . .!

So a fine if slightly fatuous record, then. But the advice still stands: if Moffat's about, lock up those daughters.