Sinister: Rolling Stone review of TBWTAS

[Delaware9 at xxx.com]

>From the new Sept 17, 1998 issue of Rolling Stone, read it and weep:

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**** (4 out of 5 stars: "excellent")
THE BOY WITH THE ARAB STRAP
Belle and Sebastian
Matador

The eight layabouts in the secretive Scotch band Belle and Sebastian are the
new kings of the kind of teen-innocence porn that makes indie-rock fans cry
"mama."  Manufacturing an illusion of high school cuddliness without actually
appealing to teenagers, they issue four-minute fluff balls of nonsense Glasgow
stories and singsong melodies - naive and fragile in the outside, tough with
knowledge of obscure psychedelic pop records on the inside.  The Boy With the
Arab Strap is the band's third album in two years, amid as many EPs and
numerous downloadable songs-of-the-week at its Web site.
Redolent of the Velvet Underground's cutest moments, this stuff is almost
closer to sense memory than to music. Slouching along with Stuart Murdoch and
Isobel Campbell's breathy, uncertain vocals, and a small, unvirtuosic
orchestra in the rear, the songs conjure aloneness, first love, discovering
poetry and not knowing what to do about it.  It's the soundtrack to staying
too long in your college neighborhood and becoming one of those types who hold
down library jobs.
The air has grown dangerously precious on each of Belle and Sebastian's
previous records, so the greater richness and sophistication of Arab Strap
come as a relief.  A few songs actually read as creditable poems:  "Seymour
Stein," a split-level daydream in which the real-life record mogul takes the
singer's sweetie away to America and his band out to dinner, holds fast to its
conceit and attains goose-bump loveliness - it's actually moving.  Elsewhere,
there are old Stones-like slide guitars, bagpipes and motor-trance rhythms,
strings, xylophones, trumpets, flutes, and organs.  And where too much of the
band's other music has been assiduously cloistered and rickety, best heard at
private moments on headphones, this album's got brilliant Spector-sound
sunsets.  It's worthy of filing next to the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out,
R.E.M.'s Reckoning, and the Meat Puppets' Up on the Sun: rock albums with an
endless summer glow.

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Even from a rag like Rolling Stone I would have hoped for a little less cruel
treatment! 

"unvirtuosic"
"rickety"
"It's ACTUALLY moving"

And I hate how every magazine in the whole wide world has to play on that
"secretive" thing, oooh, theyre so "mysterious" just cos they dont whore
themselves around like all the other bands in there...

They even printed a picture of the album cover to ruin the surprise for all of
us who were still waiting.  So if you really want to see it you can go to a
bookstore or something and check it out.  

But I know that what I say doesnt really mean much anyway cos i am just a
teenager and B & S therefore dont appeal to me.  So what do I know!

Jess

PS And what was that librarian crack?? check out

http://www.comnet.ca/~rina/index.html

if you have a problem with librarians!
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