Belle And Sebastian

SCARLET ASCENSIONS

by Fabio Russo

An ode to the songs of "If You're Feeling Sinister" comes almost naturally, arising by instinct just like the instinct that binds together these fervent yet gentle reflections, introverted and naive, virginal and bare, awkward. It's an ode to the style of composer and multi-instrumentalist Stuart Murdoch, whose gaze is a symbiosis of art and life. That vivid red on the album cover is already unforgettable in itself. Already a fateful dive into the classic. A chromatic flare that puts you on alert and builds pressure, staining the walls with intensity and drama, quickly swallowing up bodies, objects, even shadows and reflections.

In these early years, between 1995 and '96, Belle & Sebastian were tracing exemplary, natural melodic trajectories made of simple, finely calibrated spatial relationships. The transitions and shadings within their discreet musical dramas brought Belle & Sebastian close to remote, celestial and melancholy poets of Sixties pop, now dwelling in a legendary limbo: Left Banke, Love, Nick Drake, Ora, Caravan, Felt. The same perceptions and awareness, the same sinuous timbres, the same stylistic clarity of piano and guitar: whether drawing on them consciously or simply by instinct, Stuart Murdoch reworked and refined a new, exemplary "humanism" - one whose dust and misreadings by countless disciples have since produced the bed of nettles now known as twee-pop.

"If You're Feeling Sinister" lays out an Apollonian sequence of songs, enchanting in so many of its instrumental touches (above all the piano-vibraphone duet of "Seeing Other People"). These are stories of everyday life stripped of barriers or distance, sensing and revealing the poetic within the real, curiosity and new heights within the plain and the restrained. Chasing links between the everyday and the past, reality and fiction, the songs perform an invisible edit. The musicians' own lives become inextricably entwined with tales of fantasy: Stuart David, visionary and poet, fishes in his spare time, writes novels and composes music, while Murdoch resolves unforeseen encounters on trains into solitary drinks at the pub. Isobel wanting to quit college... and then Morrissey, the Roxy Music of '72, foxes in the snow and kids on bicycles, the vivid dreams of "Mayfly" and "Judy". In short, everything becomes story, or returns to being one. Reality sits right up against dream, bound to it by thin, invisible woollen threads, wrapping itself up in it in search of protection ("the stars of track and field are/ beautiful people"); yet it stirs wonder and amazement in Murdoch's defenceless singing ("fox in the snow!... fox in the snow!... fox in the snow!").

It's hard today to rewind time and, like the Connells in that song, pretend to go back to... "1995-96" in search of some easy key to the musical enigma of Belle & Sebastian. The era that gave birth to them was, after all, distracted and "lost" elsewhere, to the point of failing to notice such a precious "unicum". "If You're Feeling Sinister" thus remains, by nature and by necessity, an unchanging example of an album "of singles without singles", a monument without fanfare and a "new" debut (given that the actual first one, the propitious "Tigermilk", was nowhere to be found).

This much we learned about them in '96: that they were a group of not-easily-identifiable young Scots, gazes fixed, out of sheer survival instinct, on new shores, new creations and new projects. And while we were trying to get our bearings amid these murky, hazy melodic wonders housed in a ruby-red sleeve - the very object of our rediscovery - for them it was already time for other unreleased singles on 45.

Second just to being born/ Second to dying too

To grow young again without being seen, Belle & Sebastian kept shape-shifting through their art without ever settling into one form; to avoid sacrificing themselves, they shed their own existential and artistic baggage through yet another, new memorial.

***

THE OLD ART OF BEAUTY

by Raffaele Patti

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things" (Oscar Wilde)

Well, it might seem like a banal, obvious statement, almost meaningless - but if you dig deep into the source of this shard of wisdom, in this case Oscar Wilde, you can bet it isn't. With a bit of Aristotelian syllogism, applying the concept to the work of Belle And Sebastian, which is objectively beautiful, the reasoning leads us straight to an obvious conclusion: Belle and Sebastian are undoubtedly great artists. This is worth saying to counter the view of certain zealous critics who can't tear their eardrums away from the ghost of innovation, from the avant-garde, from the feverish need to keep exploring new paths without ever pausing to listen to someone who, in their own words, recounts the beauty of what has already happened - with the wonder, and at the same time the awareness, of someone who wasn't there at the time, but who keeps turning back to the "old" art, almost like a child endlessly seeking out a familiar shell.

And just as happens when nothing is forced, nothing constructed, everything unfolds when you least expect it. After several attempts by Murdoch (vocals, guitar, piano) to put together a band, or at least find someone to jam with, the long-awaited meeting with bassist Stuart David suddenly happens, and from there the rest of the crew is recruited for a project that was initially meant to produce just two albums before disbanding as quickly as it had come together; needless to say, fate had decidedly "alternative" plans in store for the Scottish band. After the splendid naivety of the songs on "Tigermilk", pressed in just a thousand copies and remixing, in a way, the myth of Andy Warhol's "banana", the shy group, adding a few extra instruments here and there, crafted an album with melodies that are, so to speak, perfect - never overbearing, never lacking, never bland; just right like never before. "If You're Feeling Sinister", in fact, has the flavour of an album that anyone could listen to without ever wrinkling their nose, perhaps without even jumping in their seat, yet always staying quietly alert, ears tuned for some warm note worth remembering.

The introduction, entrusted to "The Stars Of Track And Field", is almost inhibited, recalling the shy debut of the enigmatic duo ("Tigermilk" sat for weeks in the window of a Glasgow record shop, going unnoticed), but it slowly gathers courage, like a boy afraid to show himself at a first meeting, waiting for a wink to feel a bit cheeky. Once the ice is broken, the scenery opens up to livelier dances ("Seeing Other People"), the pop-wave brushstrokes of "Like Dylan In The Movies", before arriving at the achingly sweet "The Fox In The Snow", a milestone of harmonic songwriting with Drake-ian tones, one that sparks the urge to pick up a guitar and show off in front of the girl listening to you with misty eyes.

Another leap out of sadness comes with the fresh "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying", which through bursts of acoustic chords tells of young people's longing for escape; generational clashes instead seem insurmountable aboard the train of "Me And The Major", while the dreams of a young girl dance to the notes of "Judy And The Dream Of Horses".

The aching melancholy of "The Boy Done Wrong Again" follows the path traced in far earlier times by fellow countryman Donovan in his "Catch The Wind", unravelling a vocal delivery that is both pained and fluid, imploded and emotional as only the "Dylan of the old continent" knew how to sing, and from whom Murdoch and Jackson (for the first time their voices trace the same melodic arc) learn like devoted schoolchildren; another lesson learned with honours is that hint of jingle-jangle which, from the legendary Rickenbacker of the Byrds, is reincarnated in "Maifly", masterfully seasoned though with the musical flavours of the previous decade. Needless to say, the pop teachings of the Smiths hover over the entire album, which, as Murdoch himself states, is like "blood running through his veins"; the band's name, taken from Cecil Aubry's splendid novel later turned into a cult cartoon in the Eighties, well, phonetically has an impact that sounds a bit like Simon and Garfunkel, and once you've heard them, no one would ever think to consider them anything else.

A thousand and more references, then, for an album with a nostalgic flavour, yet at the same time full of fresh, innovative execution. Once you finish listening to "If You're Feeling Sinister", you immediately want to hear it again, or maybe share it with a friend. No one, not even the most demanding know-it-all, will turn their ear elsewhere; maybe not right away, but sooner or later they'll tell you: "You know, I bought it too".

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14/04/2007