
      *---*      HAPPY BIRTHDAY SINISTER BABIES    *---*

I was browsing through PointCast, went to their music section and found
this review.  If your interested, here it is :

Belle and Sebastian 
<Picture>THE BOY WITH THE ARAB STRAP | MATADOR 
<Picture>BUY IT 

BY CHRIS LEHMAN | "If You're Feeling Sinister," the de facto debut
offering from Scottish Wunderkinder Belle and Sebastian, was a bracing
but exhilarating primer in long-neglected pop fundamentals. Unassuming
front man Stuart Murdoch delivered closely observed, sly and morose
songs; the rest of the band supplied spare but hypnotically tuneful
backing. It was the kind of seamless folk-inflected pop that the word
"winsome" was invented to describe. 

Now, of course, the eminently justified critical embrace of "If You're
Feeling Sinister" casts a long and almost certainly unfair shadow on the
band's new disc, "The Boy With the Arab Strap." And just as
understandably, the new disc finds the band in a restless, experimental
mood. The short opening character study, "It Could Have Been a Brilliant
Career," segues briskly into the insistent, synth-heavy rhythms of
"Sleeping the Clock Around," only to lurch back to folkie introspection in a
listless ode to clotted affect, "Is It Wicked Not to Care?" 

But it's also around here that the listener starts getting suspicious: The
tag line of the song's outro chorus is "Would you love me till I'm dead?" a
direct lift from the outro chorus of "Northern Sky," by the ethereal '70s
folkie Nick Drake, one of Belle and Sebastian's most frequently cited
musical ancestors. It seems that Murdoch and company are starting to
tire of their own sense of youthful self-discovery and have set about
indulging in the postmodern game of cataloging influences. 

Indeed, many of the new disc's songs seem like little more than involuted
studies in pop allusion: The supremely ill-advised venture into
Glaswegian trip-hop, "Spaceboy Dream," for example, sounds like a
shotgun wedding between John Cale and A Tribe Called Quest.
"Seymour Stein," a labored depiction of an uncool record company
executive, sounds like Love's Arthur Lee on a particularly smug day.
Even the more musically robust and interesting tracks, such as "The
Roller Coaster Ride" and "Dirty Dream #2," don't stir themselves lyrically
to address anything more than an assortment of ill-defined "troubles" and
the band's own chronic sense of aimlessness. 

You certainly don't want to give up on a band as promising and as
abundantly gifted as Belle and Sebastian. But too much of "The Boy With
the Arab Strap" defies you to do just that.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
      +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
 To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe
   send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
 "majordomo@majordomo.net".  For list archives and searching, list rules,
   FAQ, poor jokes etc, see http://www.majordomo.net/sinister
          +---+   "legion of bedroom saddo devotees"  +---+
 +-+  "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list"  +-+
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

