Belle & Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister
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Free Music Notes for If You're Feeling Sinister
Free Music Review: This Shines internationally from a "dark era" called the 1990's
Hit: 5 Stars
You think you heard all the good music from the 90's there was to hear? Guess again. This album will make you orgasm and feel pangs of lost loves just because of how sweet and endearing it is. Incredible to pay attention to is the crossover from "Get me away I'm dying" to "If you're feeling sinister." It's almost as if the two songs are the same thing twisted right in the middle so you come out on the other end feeling like you know something important. As a friend once pointed out to me, once you start listening and loving this album, you will learn all the lyrics and enjoy it even more because of that.
Note: there are no guitar solo's. If you aren't willing to accept a little harmonic/folk aspect into your life then stray yourself, now. This album is incredibly beautiful and delicate, so I would strongly urge one to listen to it beforehand. If you have an overarching general adoration for all music that sounds good, not simply pop but sweet sounding music with integrity as well, get this. It may just change your life and motivate you to see belle and Sebastian before they die...or create a really sucky record that they would play during a concert. All the songs on this album are good. The song "Mayfly" i have found can be an annoying transition because it sounds like a cheerful hippy with ADD compared to the preceding song. But this is only Because of said transition. By itself, it is alright. Some of these songs will change how you view music, simply because they are that good.
Free Music Review: Magical in Glasgow
Hit: 5 Stars
In some ways Belle and Sebastian were almost a recurrence of a Glaswegian archetype. Hip, smart kids obsessed with utopian 1960s pop and boasting a healthy lack of interest in kissing corporate... have always been an illuminating presence on the Glasgow underground, with a lineage that runs back through the likes of The Pastels and Orange Juice. At their best - and 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister is still their strongest set of songs - they perfectly capture that delirious anything-could-happen feeling that hits you as you start to leave your teens behind and discover girls, books, boys, Glasgow late at night, music and venereal disease. Songwriter and vocalist Stuart Murdoch has a fantastic eye for the surrealism of everyday life and a deep compassionate joy in the world that is unrivalled outside Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl - that other classic piece of west-coast urban mythology.
The Fox In The Snow is a beautifully lisped paean to directionless outsiders, waiting just for life to happen to them, while Like Dylan In The Movies, with its hallucinogenic brass fantasias and lonely late-night atmospherics, works like dream logic as Dylan's benign presence hovers over a long walk home. But it's The Stars Of Track And Field that really caps the set, a fantastically funny and poignant rumination on the loneliness of the small-town sports star. It's a record that constantly reminds you of just how magical Glasgow can be, if only you know where to look. So start right here.
Free Music Review: Smarter than we, the Scots
Hit: 5 Stars
5.4 million people, more if you count Sean Connery, ( I don't, but that's a whole nuther story, mate ) and look what the Scots done to music. I'm not talking about the bagpipe thing, though "Amazing Grace" on pipes is pretty scary the first time, isn't it?I'm talking about Cocteau Twins, The Beta Band, Jesus and Mary Chain, Del Amitri, and Belle and Sebastian. It's a heavy burden to be a sublimely clever soft rock band in the 20th Century. No flippin' market for it, for starters, but worse, you have to write songs. None of this three chord business, with crashing drums and tons of feedback. No. And then there are the rhymes. I'm thinking of 'Fox in the Snow'. If you're looking for songs that have those nice moon/June rhymes, you're plumb out of luck. All you've got here is a fresh melody, an ironic storyline, some fine guitar picking, rich string backing, and a vocal that lets you understand all the words. Rather than go thru all the songs -- you can do that yourselves -- I'll point out that there are no bad apples here. Just peaches, the kind you like, Brad and Daphne, if those are your names.
Belle and Sebastian has carved out a very small niche, but they know what they are doing better than any other band I can think of, and they are undetered from pursuing their ideal of artistic integrity. I give this release 4.5 stars.
Free Music Review: One of the best albums of the past ten years
Hit: 5 Stars
I had never heard too much about Belle & Sebastian other than a good word and the occasional rave review and didn't give them much thought. I heard 'Like Dylan In The Movies' at a friend's house and had to hear more. This album completely exceeded all of my expectations and made me a permanent fan of the group.Musically, the album is very folkish, with most acoustic guitars, or clean electric guitars. On some songs ('Seeing Other People', 'The Fox In The Snow') the piano is the dominant instrument. Many of the tracks are also augmented with trumpet melodies ('The Stars Of Track And Field') and gentle string arrangements ('Like Dylan In The Movies', 'The Boy Done Wrong Again'). The lyrics are another high point to this album, they are absolutely fabulous. Sometimes dark, sometimes thoughtful or introspective, and always interesting.
Despite what a few reviews say, this album is not esoteric or difficult. It's actually quite catchy and melodic, even easy on the ears. It's very quirky and has that very Anglo European kinda feel to it. The music is very tonal and really quite simple and pleasing. It's not an album that "scenesters" have to pretend to like, because it easily gets by on its own merits. If you've heard good things about this group, please buy this album, it's well worth it.
Free Music Review: Classic
Hit: 5 Stars
The problem with a lot of this 1960s folk/jazz/lounge style when it origonated was that it was fragmaented--stuck on lost soundtracks and an odd song on a Nick Drake album. Great as the style was, it was underplayed and underexposed.
In the 1990s, the genre got the workout they deserved thanks to bands like Stereolab, Komeda, and, among countless others, Belle and Sabastian.
If You're Feeling Sinister is the album that made this band a permanent underground fixture. Belle and Sabastin specialize in a jazzy, sophistacted accustic music. Some of the drum styings--bossa nova, samba, and other non-latin flourishes-are dervied from coctail jazz, but the dense lyrics, and a singer that can sound like Ray Davies AND Nick Drake, lift this far beyond a retro exersize.
This is autumnal folk, and works on the senses and not the head. The reason such music worked in film and advertising way back when was that it invokes emotions--a walk in the fall woods, a glass of good wine--that are immediately reassuring. Despite a modern, edgey and litterate cinicism, If Your Feeling Sinister still has plenty of this 60s innocence. It is the real deal and works on you as such. No joking chease when it comes to this music
Highly reccomended