Belle and Sebastian's latest release, The BBC Sessions, is a collection of, that's right, BBC sessions culled from various radio performances from 1996-2001. Consisting of songs recorded for Mark Radcliffe, Steve Lamacq, and Saint John Peel, it's a solid but oftentimes bland and uninspiring release. Initial copies (for the cool kids, I suppose) also include a bonus disc of a 2001 Christmas concert from Belfast.
Though a couple of the songs included do venture away their album counterparts, the release's biggest drawback is that the majority of songs included are nearly identical to the studio versions, both lyrically and musically. In fact, anyone except the most dedicated and hardcore Belle and Sebastian fans would likely be hard pressed to easily distinguish these radio versions from those released on the band's studio albums.
Of course, most of the songs are good enough to allow the listener to occasionally look past this problem. Opening track "The State I Am In" is a solid start, if only for classic, despicable and selfishly hilarious lines like "My brother had confessed he was gay / It took the heat off me for a while" and "I was moved to kick the crutches from my crippled friend." "Like Dylan In the Movies," "Judy and the Dream of Horses," and "The Stars of Track and Field" - three songs from the band's most successful and obscenely worshiped album, If You're Feeling Sinister -follow, but are also damn near carbon copies of the versions from that indie object of reverence. Singer Stuart Murdoch's vocals and the band's arrangements are a bit like staring at your twin brother: The differences are hard to find without uncomfortably close scrutiny. Though I'm certainly not asking for any type of techno-thrash-pop interpretation of the songs, the performances come across as too staid and predictable.
One of the big attractions for the band's most dedicated fans here is the inclusion of four oft-bootlegged tracks recorded for Peel in 2001, with this release marking the first time these songs have been officially available. Each of these songs shows Belle and Sebastian evolving beyond their "signature" sound, with uneven and mixed results. "Shoot the Sexual Athlete" is kinda funky in a meek way, and also contains enough musical references to allow the listener to at least momentarily geek out. "The Magic of a Kind Word" is incredibly poppy and plays like a pastiche of bubblegum pop songs, or, perversely, something from The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family. The final two previously unreleased songs, "Nothing In the Silence" and "(My Girl's Got) Miraculous Technique," are tedious and somewhat plodding.
This release is perhaps best left for the wee-bit twee completists out there. Though most of the song choices are solid (the less said about the saccharine, overly-nasal, so-tender-it-makes-James-Taylor-sound-like-a-badass "Seymour Stein" the better), this release isn't a landmark entry in Belle and Sebastian's catalog. Its primary shortcoming is that the quality of the songs isn't enough to shake the listener's from feeling that this road's been stomped before, and with much better flow and cohesiveness, on the band's studio releases. Of course there's a fine line between a band playing to its strengths by maintaining its style and that band butchering its songs in the name of experimentation and artistic growth. Still, The BBC Sessions relies too heavily on playing it safe; the end result is a collection of songs performed with very little sense of surprise or adventure.
Showing posts with label Belle and Sebastian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Belle and Sebastian. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Book Review: 33 1/3 If You're Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef
Continuum’s 33 1/3 series is an interesting concept: take an author with a sometimes shaky level of qualifications and turn said author loose for about 100 pages to explore the influences, origins, inspirations, and critical and commercial responses of a classic album. At its best, this approach leads to a better understanding and appreciation of an album and its creators (Kim Cooper’s excellent take on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). At its worst, the end result is little more than a mind-numbing exercise in recycled minutia, wild speculations, or overblown lyrical analysis (Dai Griffiths’ dismal book on Radiohead’s OK Computer).
Scott Plagenhoef’s study of Belle and Sebastian’s 1996 album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, falls somewhere in between. Plagenhoef, associate editor-in-chief for much loved/hated online music website Pitchfork Media, does an excellent job in exploring general music themes and trends against the backdrop of the album. He expertly shows how listeners now learn about and discover indie music in the Internet and mp3 age, whether it’s even possible for a band to remain “mysterious,” and how a band’s image is often shaped by online media before a listener has an opportunity to form an independent opinion of an artist and its music.
However, the book is severely flawed in that there is little discussion about the album itself. The book is more a treatise as to how music dissemination and consumption have changed in recent years than a study of the actual album.
Plagenhoef persuasively shows how Belle and Sebastian might be one of the last groups to initially maintain an air of mystery about both themselves and their music. Whether it was deliberate or purely accidental, the band’s limited pressing of debut album Tigermilk, eventual refusal to engage the music press, and sporadic, scattershot touring all contributed to a certain myth about the band. It was essentially left to curious indie music fans to discover the band through their own efforts and small circles of like-minded fans.
Plagenhoef argues that this will likely never happen again in indie music. Now a band’s biography and recorded output can all be accessed via a good Internet search engine. In addition, listeners can no longer hear artists without preconceived notions of what that band is supposed to represent, and in the worst cases, how listeners are expected to react to the music. Plagenhoef also discusses how the simple act of listening to an album as a single activity, instead of as part of background noise to another activity, even seems antiquated.
If Plagenhoef’s argument sounds a little reactionary, a close review of the examples he gives shows that it’s hard to disagree with him. If the author can be criticized for anything in this argument, it’s that he glosses over some of the benefits artists now experience from this changing landscape, including easier ways to get their music heard by a wider audience than even a decade ago.
However, this book is advertised as being “about” Sinister. Although Plagenhoef gives a nice history of both the band and of indie rock trends in the 1990s, and addresses the major themes that emerge in the lyrics of primary songwriter Stuart Murdoch, the album is not discussed in any depth until around page 90. This is a shame really; Plagenhoef does a nice job analyzing the album’s themes, especially those centered around childhood, generational gaps, and the role of religion and sex in shaping people, but it’s almost an afterthought in the book. Other areas that are not addressed in any real depth include the album’s possible cultural, literary, and musical inspirations, the album’s place in indie music history, and how the album influenced other artists.
As an analysis of shifting trends in how new music is discovered and how perception of a band is shaped Plagenhoef’s book is an insightful read. However, it’s a stretch to call it a study of Sinister. Belle and Sebastian fans looking for an in-depth analysis of the album might be underwhelmed after reading this book.
Scott Plagenhoef’s study of Belle and Sebastian’s 1996 album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, falls somewhere in between. Plagenhoef, associate editor-in-chief for much loved/hated online music website Pitchfork Media, does an excellent job in exploring general music themes and trends against the backdrop of the album. He expertly shows how listeners now learn about and discover indie music in the Internet and mp3 age, whether it’s even possible for a band to remain “mysterious,” and how a band’s image is often shaped by online media before a listener has an opportunity to form an independent opinion of an artist and its music.
However, the book is severely flawed in that there is little discussion about the album itself. The book is more a treatise as to how music dissemination and consumption have changed in recent years than a study of the actual album.
Plagenhoef persuasively shows how Belle and Sebastian might be one of the last groups to initially maintain an air of mystery about both themselves and their music. Whether it was deliberate or purely accidental, the band’s limited pressing of debut album Tigermilk, eventual refusal to engage the music press, and sporadic, scattershot touring all contributed to a certain myth about the band. It was essentially left to curious indie music fans to discover the band through their own efforts and small circles of like-minded fans.
Plagenhoef argues that this will likely never happen again in indie music. Now a band’s biography and recorded output can all be accessed via a good Internet search engine. In addition, listeners can no longer hear artists without preconceived notions of what that band is supposed to represent, and in the worst cases, how listeners are expected to react to the music. Plagenhoef also discusses how the simple act of listening to an album as a single activity, instead of as part of background noise to another activity, even seems antiquated.
If Plagenhoef’s argument sounds a little reactionary, a close review of the examples he gives shows that it’s hard to disagree with him. If the author can be criticized for anything in this argument, it’s that he glosses over some of the benefits artists now experience from this changing landscape, including easier ways to get their music heard by a wider audience than even a decade ago.
However, this book is advertised as being “about” Sinister. Although Plagenhoef gives a nice history of both the band and of indie rock trends in the 1990s, and addresses the major themes that emerge in the lyrics of primary songwriter Stuart Murdoch, the album is not discussed in any depth until around page 90. This is a shame really; Plagenhoef does a nice job analyzing the album’s themes, especially those centered around childhood, generational gaps, and the role of religion and sex in shaping people, but it’s almost an afterthought in the book. Other areas that are not addressed in any real depth include the album’s possible cultural, literary, and musical inspirations, the album’s place in indie music history, and how the album influenced other artists.
As an analysis of shifting trends in how new music is discovered and how perception of a band is shaped Plagenhoef’s book is an insightful read. However, it’s a stretch to call it a study of Sinister. Belle and Sebastian fans looking for an in-depth analysis of the album might be underwhelmed after reading this book.
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