Sinister: mmuuu

[poetryplace2]

      *---*      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The adolescent dreaming has been replaced by a wistful sense of the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

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