Main menu
Fretplay home Submit tabs

Belle and Sebastian
Belle and Sebastian tabs Belle and Sebastian discography

Channels
Guitar channel Bass channel Guitar videos Reviews

Message Forum
Guitar forum Bass forum Bands and artists Promote your band Recent discussions All categories

Fretplay.com

Belle and Sebastian guitar tabs

CD reviews

If You're feeling sinister

Belle and Sebastian - If You're feeling sinister Audio CD

A fair review of the Belle and Sebastian "If You're feeling sinister" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Belle and Sebastian reviews here, or go back to the Belle and Sebastian tabs.

Band: Belle and Sebastian
Title: If You're feeling sinister
Rating:

Release Date:
Media: Audio CD

Tracks:

Classic
Great as the style was, it was underplayed and underexposed. 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.

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 .

Sincere sophomore
3 1/2

Captures the group at their breezy-best. moody and melancholic at times for sure, but simplistic enough to shine through before future arrangement ambitions often stilted the process.

I was a sailor before I was a pirate.
You wont appreciate it completely until you do this. This album is best listen to while alone, driving in a car, and really really loud. Spend some time with it, get to be able to sing the songs before you go dissecting the lyrics. Oh, and make sure you have enough time to listen to the album in full, and in the correct order. This album will creep up on you, if you let it. I find it's healthy to examine one's self periodically for change and understanding. In due time, this album will guide you to think about your life a little bit differently than before - something that every good folk album/song should do.

Now, a bit on the content. I've read a few reviews that doc Stewart Murdoch's voice. Well, his sound is raw. Not in the gut wrenching, wild and willy nilly sense of the term, but in the sense that he sound like he hasn't ever taken voice lessons. You can tell that his voice is the product of a well attuned ear and a natural, and again raw, sense of music. In the end I think his voice is very unique and very very good. I've never heard anything like it at all; he very much has his own sound although it's very easy to see where he's pulled from; Nick Drake, Velvet Underground, and Donavon all come to mind. His rang is great, and the patterns, while very pleasant, are rather unusual. If your not paying attention, the music easily fades into the day.

The only song I'm going to comment on is "Fox in the Snow. " It is a darling story of a dear troubled friend - as i believe many of their songs are. Fox refers to the girl (more commonly spoken as "she is a fox," or "foxy lady"). Snow refers to cocaine. The rest of the lyrics are similar metaphor. Once you know what the title means, the rest is deducible. There is something all too human about this song - I cherish it like one of my own dear friends.

Yes this album is very artsy - which is why I think many people bash it - but isn't music a form of art? If I didn't want my music to be artistic, i don't know why i would bother with music at all.

People say this is a good introduction to Belle and Sebastian. I'm not so sure. This album is a good example of the kind of music Belle and Sebastian play, but it's very loaded. I like to think an introduction should be simple. And in that sense, none of the music by this band is a good starting place. You sort of have to just dive in - much like love - a complicated mess that makes us happy to be alive, a melancholy masterpiece. I'm not saying don't start here, just that this entry is no better than any other. Again, be prepared to spend some time, a few listens, because nothing worth loving is every completely understood the first time you experience it. .

Last album with original members, last one recorded in the church hall, Stuart's favorite
If I had to choose the best Belle & Sebastian album . . I couldn't.

But "If You're Feeling Sinister" is the album I'd recommend for anyone who is looking to listen to some of their older music because they like a newer release and want a good starting place to get into some of their older stuff.

Alternately, if you've heard "Tigermilk" and/or "Boy with the Arab Strap" and like them, then this album is a more melancholic, complex, sophisticated, and oddly arousing take on their older story-like songwriting style.

When this album was released, the band never did publicity and it was next to impossible to find a picture of any of them. They sent out press photos with them in a classroom with their heads down on a desk.

Stuart David, then-bass player for the band, was really into this ink polaroids concept, where words better captured a person in a moment of time than taking a photo would because they wouldn't know they're being photographed. This was Stuart David's last album recorded with the band, and when he left the band they started doing publicity, interviews, playing more shows, toured and Stuart Murdoch's face and comments started appearing in many fan zines. Stuart David made his side project, Looper, his full time gig.

"Fox in the Snow" is lead singer Stuart Murdoch's favorite song, at least that's what he said to my friend in 2001 after my friend told him that her 4-year-old's favorite song was "Fox in the Snow. "

The title track, "If you're feeling sinister," goes on to say, "go off and see a minister. He'll take away the pain of being a hopeless unbeliever. " So a lot of hipsters and critics wondered if the band was, heaven forbid, religious. I like the line in that song where he says, "She was into S&M and bible studies, not everyone's cup of tea she would admit to me . . . "

The only thing I don't like about this album is occasional song endings with blaring horns that seem to go on forever.

The best thing about early Belle & Sebastian albums is you can listen to them over and over again and always find something new, or catch something you missed before, and it's smart, insightful, poetic somethings that often make you feel better.

"If you're feeling sinister" has several tracks with really dense, woven, pretty stories and characters in them.

"Nobody writes 'em like they used to, so it may as well be me"
Its songs are full of irresistible hooks and languid poetry, with sumptuous, dreamy melodies unfurling beneath smartly delicate (and snidely decadent, although that part isn't as pronounced) vocals. Detached, emotive, quiet, energetic, wistful, playful, folksy, and spiked with punkish enthusiasm, If You're Feeling Sinister is a thing of delirious beauty and hypnotic power. The whole thing sounds like an uncanny cross-pollination of the Smiths and Simon & Garfunkel, shot through with strains of the Beach Boys and the Velvet Underground (think "Pale Blue Eyes"). It's a smokey, gentle record full of nervous majesty and two-faced poetry, a half-awake dream that rings with humor and warmth.

The opener, "The Stars Of Track And Field," sets the pace: It builds from a delicate acoustic strum to a whispered, introverted symphony, full of swaying melodies and strange imagery, before erupting into a truly volcanic crescendo. After that comes the lush, paranoid bedroom rock of "Seeing Other People" and the quirky generational anthem "Me And The Major. " "Get Me Away From Here" is a quiet pop gem, and the title track is a gorgeously rendered pseudo-epic with fantastic lyrics. There's also the muted exuberance of "Mayfly," the pubescent drone of "The Boy Done Wrong Again," and "Judy And The Dream Of Horses," which mingles a bouncing rhythm with lyrics that are both unrelentingly sarcastic and genuinely affectionate. And let's not forget that atmospheric build of "Like Dylan And The Movies" or the haunted desperation of "Fox In The Snow. "

So, ten great songs from a very, very great band. Sounds like a great deal.

You can see a complete list of all Belle and Sebastian discography, or go back to the Belle and Sebastian tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.