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Monday, October 01, 2007
GET ME AWAY FROM HERE, I'M DYING
Belle & Sebastian
If You're Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican
iTunes : 2005
iTunes download only
LAZY LINE PAINTER JANE
Belle & Sebastian
Available on: Push Barman to Open Old Wounds
Matador : 2005
[Buy It]
MORNINGTON CRESCENT
Belle & Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
Matador : 2006
[Buy It]
Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books pairs writers and musicians with albums of import, and honestly, the results have been mixed. Some of them have been great, some have been a little heavy on fawning and light on insight (steer clear of the Aeroplane Over the Sea one unless you're a big fan of the color purple), and some have seemed like they were written over the course of a weekend (I happen to know what writers are paid for these books and that hypothesis might not be far off in some cases). But the idea of pairing writers with albums they've thought about for a long time for a tight focus in a pocket-sized book is still a great one, and while I haven't read many of the recent 33 1/3 releases, one just came out that I'm quite excited about. It's about Belle & Sebastian's 1996 classic If You're Feeling Sinister, and it's written by Scott Plagenhoef, an editor I've worked with at Pitchforkmedia for several years. I'm excited about it for several reasons - one is that, as much as I love Belle & Sebastian, they have attained such an ossified stature in my music fandom that I actually forget to listen to them amid the onslaught of new releases. A copy of Scott's book showed up in my mailbox yesterday, and it reminded to me to go back through my Belle & Sebastian albums and revisist some of my favorite songs, a few of which I'm sharing with you today. "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying" is not one of B&S's more subtle efforts, but I fell in love with it in my late-teens, which is not among life's subtlest times, and the onrush of emotion I felt listening to it then is still coded in my spine, like long-ago dropped LSD. For contrast, I've posted "Lazy Line Painter Jane" and "Mornington Crescent," the former of which is as ecstatic as the latter is retiring. But besides the chance to revisit an old favorite, I'm excited because Scott wrote it - having reads lots of his writing on Belle & Sebastian, I know he's deeply invested in the source material, and he's too smart of a writer to lapse into shallow mythmaking (and I don't think he reads Moistworks, so I'm not just sucking up). If you're unfamiliar with 33 1/3, this might be a great place to start. (If you happen to be too apocalyptically minded to get into a book about Belle & Sebastian, then Chris Ott's 33 1/3 book on Joy Division, while occasionally fawning, is well-researched and sharply observed.) You can find Scott's If You're Feeling Sinister book here on Amazon, as well as the rest of the 33 1/3 catalog.Labels: books, brian
posted by Brian
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