Last week we went to see Belle & Sebastian in Koeln - the fourth time to experience them live, after Haldern, Hamburg, and London. Although there are some reservations as regards their latest album "The Life Pursuit" (with exceptions, though: I love "Another sunny day", "For the price of a cup of tea" and "To be myself completely") - and they did play several songs of this one as they are promoting the album on their tour - their performance was great! There were lots of the old songs - classics already - such as "The State I'm in", "Dog on Wheels", "The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner", and, of course, "The Boy with the Arab Strap", and more. The new album is certainly directed at a young audience with lots of "dancing-songs".
IMO, their success comes not only from making real good music and quite original lyrics, but from the fact that they are absolutely creative, inventive and very very prolific and, obviously one of the big exceptions in a "century of fakers" (also one of their songs, by the way from the album "Push barman to open old wounds). Additionally, they're still very much"indy" and anti-commerce. They have a small stall of t-shirts and artifacts, but everything is very relaxed, rather un-businesslike, and you can't get half of the things, such as the cool brown sweater I wanted to bargain ... sigh.
Stuart Murdoch, the band's leader is constantly improving his qualities as a showmaster and seems to have overcome his original shyness. The other band members are more in the background, as always.
5/19/2006
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9 comments:
Very nice photograph of Mr. Murdoch !
I think Tiefseefisch visited the Cologne concert, too.
All a bit too fey for me...
You really think so? B & S always make me smile.
Maybe I should try them again - but they seemed to earnest...
You've tried them? What of them?
Of course I meant too earnest...
They seem to have a rather adolescent quality to me. Mr Murdoch obviously fancies himself as a poet, but he seems stuck in sixth form mode. There's a bbit of gratuitous swearing, a bit of surrealism, and, er, that's it. They just don't seem very substantial to me.
Okay, I'd agree that some,or even most of their texts are focussed on an adolescent audience, and I can understand that this doesn't appeal to grown-up people. (Oops, why does it to me, at least partly?;-). But others are quite timeless. But, texts aside: the tunes, the melodies, the range of musical expression,the ability to write songs of much more than just acceptable quality, the vocalists,their voices! I'm certainly biased,but I really think there's some quality here that singles B & S out from lots of their contemporary colleagues.
The beauty of being a B&S fan is in not caring that others just "don't get it". It's their loss after all!
This is just a modern rock blog, this is just a tender affair ...
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