BELLE AND SEBASTIAN: THE BOY WITH THE ARAB STRAP (1998)
1) It Could Have Been A
Brilliant Career; 2) Sleep The Clock Around; 3) Is It Wicked Not To Care?; 4)
Ease Your Feet In The Sea; 5) A Summer Wasting; 6) Seymour Stein; 7) A Space
Boy Dream; 8) Dirty Dream Number Two; 9) The Boy With The Arab Strap; 10)
Chickfactor; 11) Simple Things; 12) The Rollercoaster Ride.
The biggest change here is that our «Sebastian»
has finally promoted cellist Isobel Campbell to the official status of «Belle»
— not only does she sing more background vocals here than ever before, she even
gets a lead one (ʽIs It Wicked Not To Care?ʼ), and, although her frail girlish singing
is nowhere near unique in the huge world of broken indie hearts, it still provides
a perfect counterpart for Murdoch's tales of tender sorrow. Basically, this
means that the «wimpiness quotient» has been raised one more level, so if you felt
even a little uncomfortable about flinging the heartgates wide open for Feeling Sinister, you would be well
advised to steer clear of the sequel, as it is even more of a celebration of universal
sadness-lite.
The music largely remains the same, a healthy,
but generally unimpressive mix of nick-drakisms, paul-simonisms, and an occasional
ray-daviesism or two, with hardly a single particularly memorable guitar,
cello, or organ line despite those three instruments being present on almost
every track. Volume levels are equally steady, although ʽDirty Dream Number Twoʼ
unexpectedly kicks in with a firm punch midway through — lively drums, staccato
electric chords, soaring rather than crawling strings, anthemic brass, almost
as if a Phil Spector had surreptitiously replaced Tony Doogan in the producer
chair for a bit. But that's just one song, most likely stuck in the middle with
the aim of waking you up for the second half in case your nervous system
happened to be firmly lulled by the first seven tunes.
Meanwhile, Murdoch's lyrics are getting more
and more sophisticated: from masochistic self-analysis he now ventures forward
into painting abstractionist pictures of various real and imaginary members of
Glasgow society, all of them eventually reduced to a single denominator at the
end of the show: "Hey people, looking out the window at the city below /
Hey people, looking out the window, you'll be gone tomorrow" (ʽThe
Rollercoaster Rideʼ). The texts are not at all hateful, and the singing is
always pretty, but there really is a lot
of misanthropy here — leave it to the shushed, shunned, bullied «not-like-everybody-else»
kid to be really preoccupied with the
vanity and the uselessness and the transience of it all. The only reason why
the kid does not commit or even propagate suicide is because it's just as vain
and useless as everything else.
ʽIt Could Have Been A Brilliant Careerʼ greets
us with the cheery accappella line "he had a stroke at the age of
24", as Murdoch launches into a strange tale of phoney artists and fake
identities. ʽSleep The Clock Aroundʼ introduces quasi-psychedelic «electronic
chimes» — I have no idea what for, maybe to stress the lack of importance of one's
personal hustle-bustle in the face of eternity or something like that: in any
case, the basic message of the song is "look at yourself, you're not much
use to anyone". ʽEase Your Feet In The Seaʼ is a perfect story of a
romance from which the romancer derives no pleasure whatsoever — there ain't no
«love» here as such, only "trouble that we've used to know" which
"will stay with us till we get old, will stay with us till somebody
decides to go". (This is where one is usually supposed to make jokes about
30-year old virgins, but I couldn't think of a good one, and bad jokes about
virgins tend to be really bad). And
it goes on like that until the very end.
The only weird thing here that deserves further
comment is the album's title — first and foremost, a reference to Arab Strap,
Murdoch's Scottish competition led by Aidan Moffat, a band that had all the
atmospherics and depression of Belle & Sebastian without their pop
sensibilities, but then also, of course, a figurative reference to the sexual
device after which that band was named. The song itself is Murdoch at his «Kinksiest»,
engineering the album's most upbeat, quasi-martial melody and cramming in the
largest amount of social comment, not forgetting even the Asian minicab driver "with
his racist clientele", but he keeps coming back, over and over again, to
the «arab strap» idea (rumor has it that Moffat felt quite uncomfortable about
the song, as one of its interpretations is that the protagonist actually needs an arab strap to... oh, never
mind). In any case, it is one of those enigmas that is just about equally likely
to contain a whole lot of deep sense or
not to have any sense at all. Maybe it's just one of those Freudian things that
manifest themselves so frequently in artistic work done by shushed, bullied,
and reclusive kids.
Anyway, just like the first two albums, The Boy With The Arab Strap is very
pleasant listening, but falls short on great melodies and is much better
appreciated as just another radiation outburst of Murdoch's sensitive-sensible
personality. Had it leaned just a tad more in the «whiny» direction, I would
have hated it, but, fortunately, Murdoch still keeps light on his feet and
refuses to take those troubles too seriously — the message is not just a boring
«life sucks», but rather a more philosophical «life sucks, but so what? you don't
want to say you expected something else, did you? just relax and enjoy all the
sucking». Come to think of it, maybe that's what the «arab strap» is an
allegory of, in the end. A mild thumbs up overall, but only for those who love the
very idea of a «whole being larger than the sum of its parts», because, well,
the «parts» are really not all that
impressive — in particular, Murdoch's steadfast refusal to grow as a musician
begins to get a little irritating; it is exactly this attitude that breeds hundreds
of little Conor Obersts all around the world and, ultimately, might spell out a
death sentence for art as we know it.
Check "The Boy With The Arab Strap" (CD) on Amazon
Check "The Boy With The Arab Strap" (MP3) on Amazon
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