Album #2
March 10th, 2008 | by Tom |Nothing much to report today so were going to take a look at album #2 on my list of Top 15 favorite albums of all time. And the winner is…
Belle and Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister
I remember vividly the first time I heard this record. The year was 2000. i was managing a mall record store at the time and I was going through my Led Zeppelin phase. We had a 6 disc changer at the store and me and my co-workers would fill the changer with Led Zep, hit random and those would be our stores listening selections for the day. Before that i was opening the store every morning with Black Flag blasting out the doors for the mall walkers to enjoy and right before that i had just discovered the Black Crowes. so you can see where my head was at when a middle aged woman walked into the store wearing a long green trench coat, her face marked with old acne scars telling me all about ‘indie rock’ and that her favorite record was by the group Belle and Sebastian. I told her that that was the stupidest name for a band i had ever heard and she just laughed and told me her husband agreed with me but that i should listening to it anyway. I told her to have a good night when she left having made several purchases but when she was out of ear shot i cursed her stupidly named band and cranked up the ‘Battle of Evermore’ which isnt lame in any way.
As it ended up I grabbed the record she was talking about, If You’re Feeling Sinister, before i left for the night with the intention of listening to it on the way home. the fact of the matter was that Led Zeppelin was kind of getting on my nerves as was the entire genre of ‘ROCK’. I find everything after Houses of the Holy a little terrible and I can only listen to the Rain Song so many times before Jimmy Page’s huge 12 string open tuned chords start to grate on my generally very short and very already grated nerves. Robert Plant had no voice after Houses of the Holy and it is almost impossible to listen to his stupid little breathy squeal on Kashmir and and everything on ‘In through the Out Door’ and ‘Presence.’
Basically i needed a change in the music i was listening to. I had been drowning in alternative/hard rock for as long as i could remember and the lady in the trench coat came into my life at just the right moment.
I spent an hour that night driving around listening to If you’re feeling sinister and i suppose you can say that my life changed, if ever so slightly. It made me aware of different kinds of music and different ways that songs that would normally be rockers or folky rockers could be presented so that they conveyed a different message and brought about different images and feelings. I doubt that Belle and Sebastian do this to everyone and frankly i dont think that any of there other records are really all that great but by August every year i am longing for the days to grow short and the nights to get cold so i can drive around with the windows open listening to the wind blow leaves off the trees which most of the time is louder than Stuart Murdoch’s vocals.
The first thing that grabbed me about If You’re Feeling Sinister was how amazingly weird the lyrics were. Why were they singing about track stars and Bob Dylan and hookers and girls who are torn between religion and S&M? it didnt make any sense then and because i never bothered to research it it doesnt make any sense to me now but they make me laugh and i still havent heard very many new artists who are as adept at telling as detailed as story in a song as Belle and Sebastian is.
The magic on this record is from the total lack of electric guitars. An acoustic guitar is so much more expressive and effective at portraying emotion than an electric guitar and they use that to great advantage on this record. Imagine how different “Me and the Major” would be if they were banging out those bar chords on a well amplified Strat rather than a warm acoustic instrument. Its the same reason I love the Pogues, the instrumentation just exudes so much warmth its hard stop once you start listening to it. At the time this seemed like a big deal. now it just seems ridiculous that i was so in love with the sound of a sustained distorted E chord.
The center piece of this record is the title song. It most certainly has a spot on my Top 30 tunes of all time. With its introductory sounds coming from a recording of children playing on a Scottish play ground and the round tones of a Harmonium this is the quintessential Belle and Sebastian song. it is the song that defines them as i mixes soft almost Nick Drake-esque guitar strumming with a light propulsive shuffle from the drums. The song tells the story essentially of two people whose quest for answers just leads to more questions and more frustration and boredom and pain. In the end its decided that youre probably better off if you dont even bother. Its my ultimate Autumn song and gets me every-time.
If You’re Feeling Sinister opened me up to a whole world of music outside of the crap that is played on WPLR and on any classic rock station or mainstream ‘alternative’ music station across America. Since then i am a loyal purveyor of Pitchfork and Magnet magazine and there was a point, before I started quitting job and needing to sell my reocrds to live, that i had maybe 1,000 records most of them ‘indie rock’ and most of them sounding nothing like Led Zeppelin.
Thank god.
Tags: 15 Records, Belle and Sebastian
