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This highly anticipated album from Belle and Sebastian arrives with every hope satisfied. Each song is a cunning short story that wraps itself around you like a cosy couch throw. The loose theme running through this 12-song reverie is seduction. It plays out in both the drowsy sexual hopes of principal songwriter Stuart Murdoch's idle protagonists and the giddiness of bandmate Stevie Jackson's "Seymour Stein" and "Chickfactor", which document his bewitchment by the city of New York, its beautiful girls and florid pitchmen. The complex arrangements favour a whimsical diversity best experienced in "Sleep the Clock Around", which features synthesiser bloops, trumpets and bagpipes! If you haven't figured out that this Scottish eight-piece deserves every iota of hype it's receiving, it's time to have your ears checked and your record collection gone over by a certified professional. --Lois Maffeo Amazon.co.uk Review
the best summer music
No one should be without this album. It will lift you out of the deepest slough of despond. It's excellent and will put a skip in your step.
M. Putnam, 2009-08-03A classic and by far their best
Full of poignant, hummable tunes. They have never bettered this.
If you like catchy music buy it.
I am listening to Sleep the Clock Around now. Absolutely glorious. Especially when the synth solo bit kicks in, and then just when you think it can't get any better - bagpipes.
The current crop of British indie bands would sell body parts to write stuff like this. Belle and Sebastian would probably sell body parts to write more stuff like this.
A true classic.
Dappled Sunlight
Offering a gentle alternative to the rampant Oasis and Blur dominated lad culture of mid-90s Britpop, B&S's rather lovely The Boy with the Arab Strap contains a dozen catchy pop songs of nostalgia, adolescence, inadequacy, innocence, longing, desire, endless childhood summers, and odes to the joys of generally lazing around, sung with fragile voices mostly to a low-fi backing of acoustic guitar, piano and soft snare one-twos.
But this is no ordinary disposable pop; It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career starts the album with the line "He had a stroke at the age of 24", and we realise these are not songs you're likely to be singing around the campfire despite the accessibility of the simple nursery rhyme like melodies. The wistful and sometimes surreal lyrics will appeal to fans of Morrissey or Nick Drake, and conjure up romantic images of colourfully dressed bohemians reading French poetry outside coffee houses on a sunny day.
Best of all is the infectious hand clapping title tune where singer Stuart Murdoch mischievously changes the lyrics to "You were laid on your back, with the Boy FROM the Arab Strap", a nod to fellow Scotch indie-band named after said item of bedroom-wear!
8/10. 'Ease Your Feet In The Sea'
On first inspection the Amazon's favourable comparison to the Smiths and the Velvet Underground seems a little generous. And while the lyrical concerns bear resemblance to those of Morrissey and Stuart Murdoch's vocals make for a less smokey Nick Drake, Belle & Sebastian don't quite reach that songwriting bracket. Nevertheless, the Boy with the Arab Strap is a real grower, and after a few listens its melodic hooks start to catch. They excel at making music so seemingly light and effortless gradually leave its indelible mark on the heart and mind. Bleak stories of everyday failure and regret add a bitter taste to the unflinching prettiness of the music. Stuart Murdoch and Isobel Campbell aren't quite the odd couple of Lou Reed and Nico (or even Morrissey / Marr) but they make revisionist pop as dreamily saccharin as the Velvets.
'It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career' marries the Velvets' prototype dream-pop with Nick Drake's jazzier sensibilities, the folksy acoustic guitar slowly embellished with piano and alt-country tinges. 'Sleep the Clock Around' builds sweetly shimmering electronics and piano around a delicate melodic refrain. Swelling into a blissful synth and trumpet driven finale, this is where my Belle and Sebastian preconceptions went out of the window. 'Is It Wicked Not To Care' features Isobel Campbell on vocals and summery, breezy orchestrations. Despite the relative lushness of the musicianship on songs like this, it always feels loose and spontaneous, never top-heavy or over-produced. 'Seymour Stein' is like the Velvets' 'Pale Blue Eyes', with some lovely summery organs, piano and horns. 'Space Boy Dream' begins with a cryptic spoken-word sample and turns into a jazzy instrumental David Axelrod would be proud of. 'Dirty Dream Number Two' has a propulsive stomp and nice upbeat horn arrangements, reminiscent of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter.
While the invariability of the mood and the lack of vocal range can make the it a little samey, it is a gorgeous and uplifting record all the same. I was expecting something much more fey and brooding than this but it is really quite a revelation. If you like this you might like Feist's 'The Reminder' or Lambchop's 'Nixon' as well.
Musical Poetry
Some albums change your life; "Nevermind The Bollocks", "Appetite For Destruction" and "Maxinequaye" are some of those that have touched me deeply and made me a different person. "The Boy With The Arab Strap" did it for me, in a quite remarkable and totally unique way. I'd actually bought it by mistake (like I imagine quite a lot of people did, meaning to buy an album by Arab Strap), but listened to it and was impressed by the lush literacy of the lyrics, and of the delicate orchestration and musicianship. Although my favourite band was the Beatles, I'd generally considered myself a rocker (from punk through to prog), so this was a major turnaround, but that's what a great band can do you to.
It'd seemed like B&S had come out of nowhere, but this was by now their third album, and the one where they reached critical mass, both in terms of popularity (incredibly winning the "Best Newcomer" in the 1997 Brits) and in quality (this is a far richer album musically than "If You're Feeling Sinister", and probably their best).
Their territory is poetic short-stories, about losers coming good, or about people out of their depth, with beautifully-written, waspish vingnettes. Although the vocals sound very delicate, the lyrics can sting. The contrast between soaring, uplifting music and biting words can be highly effective, and undercuts the emptional effect.
The first song, "It Could Have Been A Brillian Career" sets the tone. It opens, the sound down very low, with fey vocals, with guitar and electric piano joining in. A song about losers of various types ("He had a stroke at the age of 24 / It could have been a brilliant career"), it's enriched by fanastic harmonies and further instrumentation, ending musically upbeat even as it laments another life ending sadly ("And you can tell by the way she looks / he is sorry and resigned / As he wets himself for the final time").
This is quickly followed by one of their greatest moments, "Sleep The Clock Around", a song about losers and nobodies who could, just maybe could, be somebodies. Opening slowly, the vocals low and murmuring, it gradually builds in colour, charge, potency and musical richness, to a bridge, saying "Then you go to the place where you've finally found /
You can look at yourself sleep the clock around". It ends of an incedible feeling of hope, defiance, yearning, wishing and desire, articulated (and what's incredible is that it's not embarrassing) by a bagpipe's wail. Incredible, a song of the most highest order, articulate to the highest degree, worthy of The Beatles or the Velvet Underground.
Asides from the songs by Stuart Murdoch (most of them) and Steve Jackson (the rest), there are a few sung by Isobel Campbell, as is the third song, "Is IT Wicked Not To Care?". It's gorgeously delicate, shimmering like the lightest cobwebs in a winter sun.
Other highlighs of the album include "Dirty Dream #2", where the waspish lyrics are again undercut by the remarkable music, which ends on an extended coda, the soaring strings shimmering in beautiful tremelo, evoking delight and purest joy. Incredible. Then there's a few wonderful little vignettes, such as "Seymour Stein", a no-thank-you to the record exec, with lines as brilliantly parochial as "Has he ever seen Dundee?" Then there's a failure-with-women ode, "Chickfactor", with rejection written off as well as "Met the cigarette girl- took a note of her charms / But no cigar" and "Met the Indie-Cool Queen / Took me out of the bar and showed me the scene".
Belle and Sebastian have some of the greatest gifts of any band I've ever heard - finer lyricists than Morrissey, greater musically than Nick Drake, as poetic as Larkin (both transform the everday into something numinous), as acute an eye as Roger Waters, as imaginative as John Lennon. This is to me the finest album of the 1990s and will echo down the generations, a shimmering, exhalted gift to the poets and dreamers.