Belle and Sebastian nowadays make glossy chamber-pop records, but their previous albums are, I think, early examples of what has now developed fully into the twee, hand-stitched “indie” aesthetic, I’m sure influenced by Velvet Underground’s less completely perverse songs thirty years before (After Hours, Stephanie Says). The whole indie thing has become rather sickly and cynical since then— sod off, Juno— but Belle and Sebastian do it with ragged charm and gentle wit. Their music sounds naïve, but Stuart Murdoch’s lyrics are anything but, his softly-accented observations (with just a hint of a lisp) leaving plenty of room between the lines, sometimes enough to fit entire other songs into. His words are like old and trusted friends, disarming in their matter-of-fact honesty, never judgemental but full of sensible truisms. They will tell you the truth over a cup of tea and a piece of toast while the romantics of pop music wail melodramatically outside about true love and self-sacrifice. The good news is that, with Belle and Sebastian, the truth isn’t really that bad. In fact, it is often very gently funny.
My favourite B&S tune, Seeing Other People, is built around a strange, graceless piano melody, fumbling around the verses like an awkward teenager in the back of a steamy-windowed car. Which is a rather convenient metaphor considering the subject matter; that is, young lust: “We lay on the bed there / kissing just for practice,” go the opening lines. (Can you tell I look for music-lyric relationships yet?) The joke is the narrator’s unconvincing self-delusion: “If I remain passive and you just want to cuddle / then we should be okay and we won’t get in a muddle,” he rationalises hurriedly, “‘cause we’re seeing other people / at least that’s what we say we are doing.” And here’s my favourite: “Could we be please objective? / ‘cause the other boys are queuing up behind us.”
If You’re Feeling Sinister is a notoriously badly-produced album, or at least that’s what various professional reviews tell me. (The band even issued a live version of the record to make up for it, whose rendition of Seeing Other People is, to my ear, far too hurried.) I know little of the technical details of music production but this claim, stated always as if it is so obvious as to be hardly worth bringing up, has always mystified me. Yes, the arrangements are ramshackle, Belle and Sebastian being one of those bands with seemingly dozens of members whose instruments— like Seeing Other People’s xylophone— join in and wander off apparently at random, as if distracted by a cup of tea or a slice of toast, but isn’t that part of the charm? By the end of the song the tempo has (I think) sped up a bit, presumably because the band was playing without a metronome. (I’ve wondered before why, left to play at their own pace, musicians tend to speed up during performances rather than slow down; I’m sure there’s a fascinating psychoacoustic reason, but it isn’t in This is Your Brain on Music so I’m none the wiser.) Even if unintentional, the effect— only really evident if you go back and listen to the beginning again immediately after the song has finished— subtly conveys the quiet urgency of what has to be the band’s most beautiful chord progression.
These days I guess Belle and Sebastian does use a metronome, because their last two albums have been recorded in new, shiny, high-fidelity sparkle-sound and it all checks out pretty much on-beat as far as I can discern. I liked this new understanding of modern recording techniques on Dear Catastrophe Waitress, but lost interest with The Life Pursuit, whose shiny pop aesthetic fell rather flat with me, though I appreciate that album retains every bit of Murdoch’s characteristic lyrical wit. For me, Belle and Sebastian endures in awkward, clumsy, sincere love-letters like Seeing Other People. (Of course, that was before Belle upped and left Sebastian, taking her cello with her.)
2 Comments
Excellent Blog James!
S.O.P. is my second favourite B&S tune, after ‘Your Cover’s Blown’.
I used to listen to it constantly, and loudly, mainly for the wicked piano bit at the end.
I never listened to the lyrics though, and got some pretty strange looks at dinner when I’d been blaring it down the stairs before.
“You’re gonna have to change, or your gonna have to go with girls, you’d be better off, at least you’d know where to put it”
It took me about a month to realise it was about being a gay school boy.
Hello Brendan. Nice to see people are reading this without me having to make them.
You have… blown my mind about the gay thing. Christ almighty. That explains everything. “Kissing just for practice”– I thought this was about a girl-and-boy couple who were trying to pretend they weren’t really a couple, but it makes even more sense as a boy-boy pairing. (The hand over the window!) I’d always wondered about the “you’d be better off with girls” line, but it sounds like “at least THEY’D know where to put it” to me, despite what the liner notes say (same with “you can bet it is a bitch kid” vs “I’ll admit it is a bitch kid”), which further confuses the mechanics of this rather sticky conversation. I smell another blog entry coming on.
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