"Oh, get me away from here, I'm dying, play me a song to set me free...nobody
writes them like they used to, so it may as well be me..." How true that is,
especially the heartfelt way it's sung by Stuart Murdoch on Belle and Sebastian's first "proper" album, If You're Feeling Sinister. Belle and Sebastian, an eight-piece Scottish
ensemble, have irritated just about everyone in the music industry: they
avoid the press like the bubonic plague, critics poke at their satiny music, and their refusal to play live on a regular basis has inspired a cult of devout followers who champion "the Gospel According To Stuart Murdoch." Belle and Sebastian couldn't be more cheerily irresponsible and pleased with themselves about it.
Rarely does an album like Sinister come along; a delicious ice cream sandwich of a record fortified with quirky indulgences. It's a deceptively naive album that's made for buck-toothed girls with stringy hair and closet homosexuals on the high school lacrosse team. Murdoch's lyrics
are bitingly arch and gently phrased; Sinister muses on
D.A. Pennebaker and Bob Dylan ("Like Dylan In The Movies"), the concept of
being "just friends" ("Seeing Other People"), and the socially inept (just
about every other song!). This is done without the use of generic
guitar sounds and studio-manufactured beats, but rather with less conventional
instruments like glockenspiel and piano as the primary percussive elements.
Like a deer in the headlights, If You're Feeling Sinister is a startling,
magical, fractured fairy tale of a record: eerily haunting and equally surprising. The songs on it meander off the beaten path and explore the inner recesses and profundities of a drizzly Sunday morning on the way home from church, or the hidden joys of using public transportation. The unbridled giddiness inspired by listening to this unique record can be felt by an adolescent as much as by an adult. Something as sly and knowing, yet innocent at the same time, is hard to dislike at any age. The feelings invoked by lending one's ears to enter the dark and twisting corridors of these compositions can alternate from sheer joy, to quiet introspection, to flat-out heartbreak.
Stuart Murdoch would wholeheartedly concur. As he continues to lament in the song "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying", he admits, "...At the final moment I cried...I always cry at endings."
If you like Belle and Sebastian, check out:
Belle and Sebastian The Boy With The Arab Strap
Nick Drake Pink Moon
The Field Mice Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way?
Lee Hazlewood Cowboy In Sweden
The Free Design Bubbles
-- Susannah Grossman
