Sinister: More than words

[Mark Casarotto]

Oh cripes, I see a diatribe coming on...

I've already privately emailed someone to say that I was in a pissy mood
when I wrote my review, and emphasised the bad bits of the new album. "I
Fought in a War" is a grate song, not a GRATE song. I really like it, again
small letters. But I think I need to emphasise a point I should have given
more importance to, and which is a very important point indeed when it comes
to Belle and Sebastian.

When I hear songs, especially when they're new to me, I listen almost
entirely to (or rather I *hear*) the music. By music, I mean the way the
rhythms, melodies, harmonies, walls-of-sound etc. interplay, which is picked
up and appreciated by the musicky bit of my brain. It takes me a while to
incorporate the effect of the lyrical content - a bit like learning the
piano, starting with one finger, then one hand, and then, after a while,
mastering the full range of possibilities.

In practice, what this means is that, for me, a song like Blueboy's
"Remember Me" can have as powerful an immediate effect as "Seeing other
people". I know full well this doesn't happen to everybody. I wouldn't
expect it to. But while Belle and Sebastian songs have on several occasions
made me cry, it's been after a very long time knowing and loving them, when
the words really begin to broach the walls of my psyche. The process is only
just beginning with Fishyflaps; I have welled up during "The Chalet Lines",
which I recognise is a very obvious choice, but maybe its very blatantness
is the only reason it has managed to have an emotional effect with words. 

However, even when I get to know the words as well as the music, it's always
the music by which a song lives or dies. Put the words of Slow Graffiti into
the mouth of that cunt from the Lighthouse Family, it would still be a
beautiful and poetic libretto, but you can bet your bottom dollar the tune
would still be dreadful. Essentially, the implications regarding FYHCYWLAP
are that because of the subtle beauty and depth of (most of) Struan's
lyrics, it's going to take me a long time before I can full appreciate the
words, and therefore the song as an entity. So at present I am mostly
focussing on the music. I Fought in a War is indeed a beautiful song, but
can anyone honestly say they had no idea how it was going to develop the
first time they heard it?

Reading this back to myself, I see that this is really a very self-indulgent
letter, describing how the mind of one amongst a thousand interprets the
music that forms our common ground. Sorry about that.

BG Mark xxx

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