REVIEW: Belle and Sebastian, The Boy With the Arab Strap (Matador)
- Niles J. Baranowski
It's a little-known fact, but over in England, the Scottish septet Belle and Sebastian have actually had a Top 40 hit and appeared on the British show Top of the Pops. What makes this so interesting and unlikely is not that Belle and Sebastian have an inaccessible sound, but the fact that they put so much effort into acting like an obscure cult group. Not only do they refuse to be photographed but their interviews are terse and tight-lipped and they have either an intense fear or distaste towards live performance (their upcoming American tour is four times as large as their first with a whopping eight dates).
Fortunately, though, while Belle and Sebastian themselves hide under their rocks, their music continues to grow and reach out to the world. The Boy with The Arab Strap is their fourth album worth of material in three years (if you lump together the four EPs that they released over the course of the summer of '96) and continues their trend away from cutesiness towards the sort of gorgeously written misery poems that Love and Nick Drake pioneered. In an age of so much retro, however, Belle and Sebastian aren't content merely to rehash the late 60s and early 70s. Rather, they build upon it as a respectable musical tradition as the Smiths did in the 80s.
While none of the band's members are as talented as the Smiths' Johnny Marr, the orchestration that seems to be developing in Strap's 12 tracks is a direction that the band should continue to pursue, if even at the cost of a few hooks (as it is here) because it fits their largest musical strength, collectivism. There's even a few new ideas in the arrangements; "Sleep the Clock Around" may be the first folk-pop song to use buzzing theremin-esque noises as a backdrop and it complements the frantic and worried pace of the song so well that I hope the band continues to use it. On the delicate, sky-blue "Is it Wicked Not to Care?" they feature female lead vocals for the first time, to excellent effect as well. Oddly enough, the best pop song here is "Dirty Dream Number Two," which contains a pretentious, wall-of-sound string section. Though it comes off sounding a little bit like My Life Story, it's a huge step above them in all respects and feels like a hit single.
Even the band's most ambitious experiment, a spoken-word space odyssey called "A Space Boy Dream" isn't a total failure. While it owes a huge debt to the Velvet Underground's "The Gift," it's much more musically varied. Though the poem is garbled by both a thick Scottish accent and constant mumbling, it could have been a brilliant instrumental.
On most of the other tracks, however, the lyrics are nearly poetic. While they share the Smiths' predilection towards the nasty side of youthful life, there's a specificity here that most of Morrissey's songs lacked. Lead vocalist Stuart Murdoch can alternate between shocking ("it takes more than milk to get rid of the taste") to accusatory ("you were laid on your back with the boy with the arab strap") or even a partially imagined incident where Sire Records CEO Seymour Stein tries to take the band to dinner and takes Murdoch's girlfriend home with him instead. All of this could come off scatalogical or petty in lesser hands (this means you, Beautiful South!) but Murdoch's smooth doe-eyed voice makes the whole lot of it seem perfectly natural.
Though there's a twee streak that still bares itself at times and you'll probably find yourself wanting to throttle Murdoch during "A Summer Wasting" and "The Rollercoaster Ride," somehow it's unimportant because half of these dozen tracks show the band reaching for a maturity, either in lyrics or music, that they previously hid from. And at least half of the others (like the tear-jerkingly gorgeous "Chickfactor") are so hummable and pretty that it feels churlish to find fault with them.
So, Belle and Sebastian may not have made the album that would save Britpop as some in the press have predicted. Instead, they've proven themselves the torchbearer for the sensitive and shy of the late 90s and at a time when youth increasingly gravitate towards the thuggishness of new metal and hip-hop, I don't think that's a virtue that can be dismissed so easily, especially when Strap is such a well-made album, appreciable even without its noble sentiments.
