*---* HAPPY BIRTHDAY SINISTER BABIES *---* A rather nice review in today's Select magazine, which thanks to the miracle of OCR I can reproduce for you below. There was also a chirpy little interview with Stevie, but I couldnt scan it cos it was in a funny colour. I haven't bothered to proof it because a) it's more fun that way and b) that's all I've been doing since 7am this bastard morning. Love Trousie xxxx BELLE AND SEBASTIAI4 The Boy With The Arab Stiap .IEEPSTER ( Third album from Glasgow eight-piece, following 'Tigermilk' and the acclaimed 'If You're Feeling Sinister; both released in 1996. ( The limited-edition 'Tigermilk' is now worth a small fortune - so much so that Belle And Sebastian guitarist Stevie Jackson recently sold a spare copy for £450. When people use the word 'cult' about bands they usually mean 'desperately unpopular'. In the case of Belle And Sebastian, however, it's entirely appropriate. They rarely play live, refuse to have their picture taken and give interviews about as often as Stanley Kubrick. Yet they recently sold out London's Shepherd's Bush Empire in a day. They also have their fair share of acolytes. Getting a single in the charts may not seem like much these days, but to do it without making a video and still keeping your day jobs? You have to wonder how Embrace would've fared under similar conditions. Here, their perversity is best demonstrated by the fact that right when mainman Stuart Murdoch is on the cusp of being acknowledged as a truly potent songwriter - a kind of cuttingly literate anti-Noel - he lets a handful of compositions be written and sung by three of the band's own Boneheads and Guigsies. And then there's the fact that the title namechecks fellow Caledonians Arab Strap. Belle And Sebastian's preciousness about their music can sometimes verge on the adolescent - the line "Record company man, I won't be coming to dinner"somewhat spoils the sumptuous 'Seymour Stein'. But listening to their third album, you can understand why they wouldn't want to taint music this joyously individual by appearing next to that bearded buffoon on Channel 5's The Pepsi Chart. In the past, Belle And Sebastian seemed to live through their book and record collections, their songs dripping with fairly obvious boho allusions to Bob Dylan and Sylvia Plath. Now they sound genuinely 'For Real' in their plaintiveness. The adolescent dreaming has been replaced by a wistful sense of the disappointments of growing up, like Douglas Coupland's mid-20s breakdown set to music. The album's opening line, sung unaccompanied by a fragile-sounding Murdoch, sets the whole tone: ~He had a stroke at the age of 24/It could have been a brilliant career." And while they've remained in the same musical bracket as Nick Drake and the early Velvets, there's a sense of adventurousness here that fits the lyrical assurance. 'Sleep the Clock Around' is a gentle ode to laziness, rendered dreamlike by mysterious blooping sounds before the unexpectedly welcome arrival of a bagpipe, while the downbeat wall-of-sound pastiche 'Dirty Dream #2' sounds like The Ronettes, albeit with Alan Warner in charge rather than Phil Spector. Elsewhere they manage to move out of their familiar landscape of provincial Scottish youthclubs. 'Chick Factor', named after the US alt-rock uber-'zine and written and sung by guitarist Stevie Jackson, is a homesick letter from America in the same folksy vein as Simon and Garfunkel's 'Homeward Bound'. But even here the aching melancholy is lightened by touches of ribaldry that would make Morrissey proud: "Met a cigarette girl, took a note of her charms/But no cigar." All of which makes you curious as to whether their ambivalent attitudes towards their musical 'career' is a necessary part of their make-up. At one point Stuart murmurs "Anything's better than posh isolation" - having created one of the albums of the year, perhaps now they should move from being a secret society into a fully-fledged religion. mmuuu JOHN MULLEN +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". For list archives and searching, list rules, FAQ, poor jokes etc, see http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +---+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" +---+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+