Don¹t you just hate music journalists? Getting to hear records weeks, if not months before the poor blighted punter¹ What a life. The downside of course is that you tend to miss out that whole excitement about the release date thing; that marvellous sense of expectation as you queue in line for the record store to open, that heart in the mouth moment as you fork over your cash and rush home to whack it on the record player. Sorry, showing my age there should have read before whacking it in your PowerBook and ripping it onto your iPod¹. Of course I never considered myself a music journalist, which is just as well because nor has anyone else, but still it¹s nice to pretend. Especially since it¹s meant reigniting my love affair with that band of ragamuffins some call Belle And Sebastian. See, the way things have been recently I wouldn¹t have bothered to even cast more than a casual eye over the fact that they have a new album lined up. I mean, I¹d been unimpressed by anything they¹d done since (bits of) Arab Strap¹. I thought, ach, I don¹t need Belle And Sebastian in my life¹, and you know the only reason that big poster for those mythic Manchester Town Hall concerts still hangs on my classroom wall is because it¹s too high up for me to easily reach. So when a copy of Waitress¹ fell in my lap, I had the review all ready to go. It talked of Moments and Memories and dismissed their current effort with a toss of the hand, a flick of the wrist and a we¹re all different people now¹. I thought I¹d let them off lightly, thought I had played the drifted-apart former lovers part pretty well. Then I listened to the album. And then I listened again. It¹s five days later and I¹m still listening. Hardly anything else has managed to get on the stereo in the meantime. To say I¹m surprised isn¹t even in it. So I¹m not going to repeat the things I ended up writing in the second draft of that review here, except to say that, ah, well, look: I WAS right and we¹re none of us the same as we were, and that¹s just fine. Belle And Sebastian no longer sound to me like the same slightly scrawny gang of scruffy scallywags I fell in love with all those years ago (look in the archives if you¹re a youngster, or in the deepest recesses of your memories if you¹re a Sinister Original¹ for which read old git¹). They sound more self-assured, and they sound like they¹re having a whale of a time. Which is something we should not underestimate the value of in Pop. Waitress¹ sounds like a magical Pop confection, crammed full of wonderful songs that are stuffed with wonderful moments that skip and soar, that crawl along your spine laying butterfly kisses as they go. Lines leap out and ambush you with a knowing grin; there¹s lyrical and musical nods of reference and reverence that glow with wit and arch wisdom but that never for a moment sound laboured and over-wrought with cleverness¹. Best of all today are the sounds of ping pong balls, the lovely Thin Lizzy references, the line about walk away renee¹ and the fact that Stay Loose¹ sounds like an outtake from Back in Denim¹ (some mighty, mighty recommendation in case you were wondering). Oh, and the fact that Wrapped Up In Books¹ sounds for all the world like Cliff Richard¹s In The Country¹ (as covered by The Farmers Boys). So, you know, sorry to annoy all of you real fans who do the queuing outside the record store, but I just had to share this with you. I know you¹re all going to love this record when you hear it. It¹s the kind of record obsessions build themselves around. I can almost feel a Belle Lettres 2 coming on Lots of love The Duke. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+