Gosh, To my surprise, I seemed to have joined the ranks of B&S dreamers as of the other morning: As if the musical portion of the dream wasn't painful enough, I was sidelined for my (soccer) team's championship game, so I had to cheer a dreary 0-0 tie from a corner. As we filed out, B&S was playing "Woman's Realm" in the bandstand, but *Winona Ryder* was up there butchering the vocals; she could not hold a note to save her life...ouch! For anyone collecting reviews, my *mom* was thoughtful enough to send me this one... Belle and Sebastian: Glasgow Revisited Belle and Sebastian are precious. A seven-piece folk rock group from Scotland, the band recorded its first album as a school assignment; its delicately strummed songs, graced with recorder, flute, violin and hushed vocals, would sound at home in a British campus coffeehouse circa 1973. The band's enigmatic frontman, Stuart Murdoch, reportedly works as the live-in caretaker of a Glasgow church--where he sings as a choirboy. You might ask: Is this a rock band or an Evelyn Waugh appreciation society? In a rare public statement, Murdoch has admitted that he is "ludicrously nostalgic for a time and place that never existed," and it would be easy enough to pigeonhole Belle and Sebastian as a fey flashback act. But Murdoch's nostalgia has sharp edges and his songs are at once swooningly gorgeous and very funny. The band's fourth album, "Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant," is slightly disappointing only in that it contains too many songs not by Murdoch. Not every group can have both a Lennon and a McCartney, and Murdoch's band mates are ordinary songwriters. (Isobel Campbell's "Beyond the Sunrise" is particularly dreary.) But like 1998's "The Boy With the Arab Strap," the new album helps make up for its subpar tunes with sonic richness and aural texture that the band's earlier recordings lack. The album--which lists 18 guest performers playing trombone, double bass and flute, among other instruments--has a toy orchestra sound that skirts cloyingness but often achieves a lush beauty. The baroque violin and harpsichord of the exquisite "The Model," for example, bring to mind the Left Banke (remember "Walk Away Renee"?) as Murdoch draws us into one of his tales of snubs, poseurs and unrequited crushes: "All my friends deserted me because you painted me as the fraud I really was." Every great band defines its own imaginary geography, and Belle and Sebastian turn industrial Glasgow into a romantic and witty city of cafes and parks where lovers quarrel and misunderstand, and boys flirt indiscriminately with boys and girls. As he points out on "Nice Day for a Sulk," it's always a "nice day for a mood/ the forecast is good." Murdoch's lyrics evoke a world that's part "Brideshead Revisited," part Smiths, brimming over with ungendered erotic longing, post-collegiate lassitude, welfare state ambition and hazy memories of old movies. A Murdoch lyric will delineate not only individual characters but whole social worlds with the economy of a novelist or at least a wicked gossip: "She met another blind kid at a fancy dress/ It was the best sex she ever had." As a songwriter, Murdoch comes off as a more literate and marginal version of the Smiths' Morrissey--not only in his Wildean wit, but in the intense sympathy he brings to the amusing teenage misfits who populate his songs. (To hear a free Sound Bite from this album, call Post-Haste at 202-334-9000 and press 8174.) ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead 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 +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+