100 favourite albums: # 10: If You're Feeling Sinister - Belle and Sebastian

I don't know. A part of me feels that Sinister is so fragile that it would fall apart if you so much as breathed on it, but another part thinks that it's actually considerably more sturdy than its delicate, precious exterior suggests. The reasons for the first of those impressions are obvious enough (this is Belle and Sebastian we're talking about, after all, and well before they developed the muscular gloss of their latter-day records); as to the other, I think it has a lot to do with just how well wrought every single song on it is...the quiet sad ones (most directly, "Fox in the Snow") are just as carefully and precisely put together as the more obviously robust numbers like "Me and the Major" and the mid-tempo pieces which make up the principal cloth of which the album is cut, of which "Like Dylan in the Movies" is the paradigmatic example, not just on Sinister but amidst their discography as a whole.

"Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying" is the big one off Sinister, I suppose, and deservedly so - it's one of those songs where everything comes together perfectly for its three and a half minutes, jaunty bagatelle, lament and bedsit anthem all at once. But "Seeing Other People" is the one that has the most personal meaning for me, and it, along with "The Stars of Track and Field" and "Judy and the Dream of Horses" are my favourites; thinking about that now, I realise (though surely not for the first time) that Belle and Sebastian are one of the few artists where lyrics and music are equally important to my affection for them.

Of course, my feelings about Belle and Sebastian go well beyond mere affection; here's probably as good a place as any to collect various previous more or less tongue-tied attempts to express why they have such a place in my heart, viz:

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You really need to be in a very specific space to fully appreciate these wry, precious, oh-so-twee, librarian-chic clad indie-kids, but those of us who understand will always feel something akin to love for Belle & Sebastian — for their eloquent sneers at bourgeois society, for their quiet, wistful recognition that modern life was not made for such as them or I, and for their whimsical, faintly melancholy sense that for all of that, it’s the little moments and the gentle absurdities that make it all worthwhile. - 1/04

... it may not be entirely accurate to think of the two Stuarts, Isobel, Stevie and co as forever meandering, bookish, gentle, distracted, lightly tripping, out of step with the rest of the world, in a strange timeless realm of their own - but even still, that's the picture of the band that I'd like to retain. - 26/4/06

... their music represents something for me - some hazy ideal of elegant disaffectedness, at once brightly lit and sepia-toned, thoroughly contemporary and yet not at all made for these times, breezy and subtle and shot through with something wistful...music for the heart and for the inner life. - 22/2/07 (of both Belle and Sebastian and Saint Etienne)

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Simply put, Sinister is their most complete and best album. What else is there to say?