Sinister: fuzzy

[Rachel Playforth]

I don't know how I feel about the new album. Not that I've heard it, I just 
mean how I feel about the prospect. I don't think I feel anything. I just 
think: there's an album coming out.

I don't have it in me to be a fan any more. Of anything. I still have music 
that I love to listen to; Buck 65 makes me marvel, Busted make me grin, 
Camera Obscura make me smile and cry, Go Betweens make me warm and fuzzy, 
Beyonce makes me shake my booty, etc etc. And Belle & Sebastian still do 
some of the things they always do.

But they don't creep into an empty space in my head and live there any 
more, because that space isn't there. Nobody else's words or lyrics fit my 
life perfectly now, because I've worked out my own words (less eloquent 
though they may be). I can still be moved by music but I can't be defined 
by it. I can't turn to Stuart Murdoch to solve a problem, but I don't 
really need to.

There's a trend, in my life as well as in some of my friends', to shift 
away from the 'meaningful' music I loved as a teenager - Radiohead and 
Smashing Pumpkins and REM, and yes, B&S - and towards frothy chart pop. I 
thought for a while that this was just because I've grown up and I'm not 
such a repellent little snob. But thinking about it, it's also because some 
'meaningful' music is only meaningful when you haven't got a meaning of 
your own yet. Once life has solidified around you a bit, even 10 minutes of 
intense wailing and verbiage doesn't quite cover all the bases. Better to 
leap around to S Club 8 and mentally stave off impending death than pretend 
that Coldplay feel your pain.

And that's why gigs and albums and DVDs by Belle & Sebastian are just gigs 
and albums and DVDs to me now.

I feel like a traitor, but then again B&S have always been more than the 
sum of their indie parts, just by virtue of indirectly causing Sinister and 
all its seismic interpersonal happenings. By which I mean to say: I 
couldn't have met half the people that give my daily life its sparkle were 
it not for Belle & Sebastian. That's no mean feat.

So of course I'll buy the album and shell out for a ticket to see them in 
Brighton - finally! - and follow their fortunes with extra fondness, even 
if I won't spend any more time musing on the track order and the new 
direction and the lyrical conundrums that I would for anyone else.

Hope you're all well and ready to embrace autumn (or spring). New seasons 
seem either to bring very good or very bad things, but nothing ever stands 
still. I'm going to be a student again next week, which is doing all kinds 
of scary things to my sense of identity. Maybe I *will* return to angsty 
music after all...

Oh, and Glasgow lot - I'm hitting your city in two weeks time. It's been 
far too long, and I can't wait :)

love Archel xxx

PS. I refuse to believe that Maddieminx isn't still reading on the quiet, 
so: yo! Maddie! check your email!

PPS. Very very happy birthdays to Stacey dahling and Laura Llew, two of the 
presiding spirits of Sinister and both deserving of gifts and adulation to 
the max!

PPPS. Extra hugs to Ken Chu.

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 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
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