Hello, So *that* was the article about B&S. I read through the first paragraph and after realizing it was some sort of dissertation on why Mr. Fitchett is far too obsessed with 69 Love Songs, I stopped reading. Now having skimmed over the bits where he goes on and on about creating mobiles of pictures of Stephin Merritt to put over his bed, I find that there is actually some mention of Belle & Sebastian in there. This sort of thing infuriates me to no end. Critics. People who seem to think that they are illuminating us about our own opinions. Most people realize there cannot be objective standards for music. Since I do, here's mine, but keep in mind I am guessing that a lot of other people liked 69 Love Songs more than FISHYCLAP by the looks of things. And that's fine if that's the way they feel. However I seem to have taken the opposite tack. In love with Fold Your Hands and disappointed by 69 Love Songs. I respect that 69 Love Songs is very interesting conceptually. But the bare fact is that no one is capable of writing 69 quality songs in that short a span of time. So as a result we get joke songs as filler, moments of brilliance and lots of mediocrity in between. It's all very interesting as a concept but piss-poor as an album if you ask me. Like if in the VU boxed set they would have mixed the album tracks in with the unreleased demos. I don't fault the Magnetic Fields for releasing this record but I find it difficult to imagine anyone liking this record enough to tout it above their heads, comparing contemporary albums spuriously. In the article Mr. Fitchett asks the reader how many times he or she has actually listened to FISHYCLAP and how many all the way through. For my part I could probably answer more than any other album which came out in the year 2000, whereas I only managed to listen to the entirety of 69 Love Songs once, the first time I brought it back from the store, and subsequent discs found their way onto my CD player quite sparsely. I see it as a great shame that such great songs as "Ferdinand de Saussure" are featured on the same album as "Punk Love." And as for the Magnetic Fields being driven by Merritt and B&S being a collective due to Struan's seeming reluctance to be a frontman. This is very true, but if Belle & Sebastian were to release 69 of Struan's songs I think I would feel the same way. I would really like to see Stuart Murdoch be more of a focus in Belle & Sebastian, and I don't think I am alone in that. But to see Belle & Sebastian become a vehicle for his whims of fancy would be far too much of a good thing. If we have to endure the Ringo-like musings of other B&S members' songs, so be it. Take it part & parcel. I always did like Octopus' Garden anyway. -- Brian Pennington, aka Mick McMick | cellophanesky@mac.com | ICQ# 39021436 Sandcastle Records: <http://www.indiepages.com/sandcastle/> the Cellophane Sky:<http://home.earthlink.net/~cellophanesky/the/index.html> "Better a tear of truth than smiling lies." - Duncan Browne +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+