Belle and Sebastian

When you talk about a band like Belle and Sebastian, it seems to me like all too frequently you’re just beating a dead horse — they aren’t really a band that there is something “new” to say about, they have had a longish career filled with some truly wonderful albums and can be described as “sardonic, witty, clever, poppy.” Blah de blah de blah, so I doubt I am introducing anyone to them, but perhaps, if you already have some of their albums, this will inspire you to look at them again.

I was introduced to B&S as a freshman in college at the behest of my roomate at the time. Most of the music I listened to then was hardcore or metal with some occasional overly sentimental angsty teen crap. I got the album “If You’re Feeling Sinister” first, and when I pressed play I felt like I was introduced to a whole new world musically and lyrically. The opening track “stars of track and field” is a slow, understated song, delivered in Stuart M’s typical way. Beginning with a very quiet acoustic intro, we begin to learn about various characters and their lives via the cynical narrator. The music builds fantastically, to sound like every music critic ever, it is “lush.” The percussion is very much in the back ground, but the basswork sets a nice pace to the song while the guitar smoothly dances about a major key. An organ mumbles somewhere in the back grounds and during the build ups we hear ramping drum sounds, mounting guitar work and a sense of tension, released by a return to the stripped down interstitial portions. The song has a horn solo which, as a rare thing in music, doesn’t seem like a gratuitous afterthought. All the while this beautiful, ornate music tells a story that is at times playful, at times harsh and thoroughly human.

Needless to say, given this strong reaction to the first track on the album, I couldn’t help but listen more and more to my new favorite band. I’d say that comparisons to The Smiths are somewhat fair, in that both made great pop songs with clever lyrics, but whereas Morrissey seems to deal with personal experiences and interractions between humans around him, in-media-res, Stuart Murdoch seems to occupy the position of some sort of anthropologist-cynic, judging the characters in his stories with a fair, but brutal hand, all the while avoiding seeming mean-spirited.

After listening to If You’re Feeling Sinister constantly for a few months, I found myself diving further into B&S’s oeuvre, from the much rawer “Tigermilk” an album compositionally similar to Sinister, but adorned with a kind of lo-fi sheen that gives it a very unique place in their whole body of work. Two years after Sinister Belle and Sebastian released The Boy With the Arab strap. For some reason, with this album, while not reinventing themselves as seems to be required for a band to be truly great, they continued to develop their own person idiom, and some of the songs on this album are my favorite, “It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career” which tells the stories of two people destined to be fantastic charlatans, careers punctuated by a premature stroke. Something that is also awesome about this album is the fact that it got a .8/10 by pitchfork, the very spiteful reviewer opened the review with “Mediocrity is not a punishable crime, but if it was, Belle & Sebastian would be enjoying their last meal right about now.” Ouch. I’d feel sorry for them but it’s a truly fantastic album, if anything I feel sorry for the reviewer who seems to be incapable of enjoying music. He goes on “Are we still learning from the Mel Bay book of guitar? Where are the interesting chords? Only the title cut offers up something fun, and that just sounds like a glorified Hollies song.” Where are the “interesting chords” seems to strike me as particularly comical. Would the album have been good if they decided to have 13 minute long psychedelic jams in Eb mixolydian? No, and I think the fact that they refrain from engaging in self indulgent experimentation indicates the overall quality of their albums, the have a style which they develop and perfect — who cares what key a song is in if it’s good.

But that is not to say they can’t misstep. If there was a low point of their career I’d say it was 2000′s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant. For some reason this album is obsessed with the harpsichord and flute. The songs sung by now ex-member iIsobel Campell are just kind of flat and never particularly grabbed me. Certainly this is probably the most baroque of their albums. But that is not to say it’s lacking in fantastic moments. In fact, one of the most beautiful and funny songs they wrote appears on this album. The Model is a sort of duet between Stuart’s tenor and Stevie’s baritone as they hope through a story about a model whom the narrator simultaneously loves and despises.

I am just going to pretend the album Storytelling doesn’t exist since I down own it and have never heard it so that I can continue onto 2003′s Dear Catastrophe Waitress. This album seems to indicate the direction they would follow in the future with more electronic piano and drum influenced songs, with more bass and less guitar. The track Step Into My Office, Baby is hilarious and even has an awesome music video to go with it.

Other standout tracks are “Asleep on a Sunbeam” which is very different from a lot of their songs, lacking in cynicism and sardonic humor, it is just a very sweet, sentimental song which complements the vocals of Sarah Martin, and I’m a Cukoo, which also has a badass video:

After diving head first into very poppy music with . . . Waitress they returned to rock with the very guitar heavy 2006 album The Life Pursuit. This album has more “whole band singing” moments than previous efforts and captures the more interesting instrumentation of Fold Your Hands and combines it with the pop sensibilities into a new form that fits them well as they have evolved into an indie rock icon over the past 13 years.

I highly recommend almost all of their albums, but if you ever want to get into them, I’d recommend If You’re Feeling Sinister first, because the title track alone makes it a fantastic album with emotional complexity I haven’t seen in many releases by any other artist.

-CB

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