Sinister: re-view from the Washington Post

[#M. P.]

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.)


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