TWAS 237: Belle and Sebastian, Marine Research
glenn mcdonald
www.furia.com/twas
Suddenly Something Goes Click in Your Heart
TWAS 237, 12 August 99
Belle and Sebastian: Tigermilk
Marine Research: Sounds From the Gulf Stream
Belle and Sebastian: Tigermilk
I bought If You're Feeling Sinister, the second Belle and Sebastian album,
on a slow Tuesday for new releases in June, 1997. My record-collection
database has a field for purchase dates, so I can tell you that the prize,
that week, was the long-awaited American release of Kenickie's At the Club,
which would end up at #4 on my 1997 top-ten list. The second album I got
that day that made enough of an impression to merit writing about was
Megadeth's Cryptic Writings, and I use "merit" loosely, since it interested
me mainly for its unapologetic anachronism. I haven't listened to it since,
and I might never listen to it again. The other four records I bought were
all extremely subdued, in a year when the only subdued albums to really
captivate me were two early Apartments reissues. Three of the four, frankly,
were the answers to questions I ought to have known were rhetorical. Would
I abruptly start liking 10,000 Maniacs now that Natalie Merchant was gone?
Was all it would take to dispel my resistance to Ron Sexsmith's frail voice
another forty minutes of it? In an album setting, would it be easier for me
to focus on Tara McLean's pretty singing and ignore her banal lyrics than it
had been in concert? This is the kind of inane investigative diligence that
afflicts me when I find myself walking toward the register with only one or
two discs in my hand. If You're Feeling Sinister, on the other hand, I
bought entirely in deference to intriguing hype, without much idea of how
I'd react. If I'd acquired it in different company, maybe I would have paid
better attention, but in a stack with one electrifying punk record, one loud
metal record, and three quiet albums that bored me, it was too easy to just
make it four quiet albums that bored me, and move on. But that was 1997. I
think I'd heard the words "Sarah Records", but they didn't mean anything to
me yet. I'd never heard a single song by the Field Mice, or the Orchids, or
Heavenly. If I'd called something "bedroom pop", I'd probably have meant
that it sounded like Heart. Belle and Sebastian belonged to an aesthetic I
was so little attuned to that the only response I could think of to If
You're Feeling Sinister was "But I have four Nick Drake records already."
And so as their quiet, subdued following gathered recruits, I started
thinking of them, if not as Evil exactly, then as one of those bellwethers
by which I recognize the difference between the kind of band I ought to like
and the ones I actually do. As I pursued every other available post-Sarah
lead, though, on this year's epic quest, Belle and Sebastian came up over
and over, and I'm only so strong. Plus, I'd seen how much original copies of
Tigermilk, their school-project debut, were going for on eBay. Pinned
between a completist conscience and a collector's curiosity, I finally
surrendered. If they're willing to go back to the beginning of the story,
reissuing this, I will be too. Forget what I know, or what I thought I knew,
about If You're Feeling Sinister, forget the few radio fragments of The Boy
With the Arab Strap, which I didn't buy. Delete all judgments. The last time
we met, I was younger and they were older. Things can be as different, now,
as we let them. Press Play.
My heart is clear of my body within five minutes. Five minutes? Maybe
two. The nominal chorus to "The State I Am In", more like a recurrent
bridge, doesn't arrive until later, but by two minutes in we've reached the
place where Stuart Murdoch says the title for the first time, and we're two
and a half verses into a story that already has seven characters, six or
seven complicated interpersonal relationships, and a priest that turns the
confessions he hears into paperback novels. By two minutes in we have
Murdoch's whispery voice, an acoustic guitar that seems to be reaching us
through a microphone meant for something else, a shimmery electric guitar or
two, some billowy organ, shuffling drums and the first few measures of
gossamer harmony vocals, like the sounds of a bedroom metamorphosing into a
daydreamed amphitheater. By two minutes in we have the architecture of an
incarnation of bedroom pop that believes, adorably, that it's rock and roll.
And two minutes is enough to read the clipped biography of Sebastian and his
new friend Isabelle, the half-imaginary authors of these songs, on the back
of the booklet, which is as succinct an evocation of the shyly idealistic
spirit of Sarah Records as many of Matt and Clare's insert polemics. If
Marilyn Manson offers introverts a glittery escape, and Korn tries to simply
drown out their internal monologues, Belle and Sebastian present the more
thoughtful ones with the possibility that melancholia and uncertainty aren't
states you need to escape. They could easily be the Field Mice reincarnated,
frankly, which seems like a fine idea to me. They are the Smiths, without
greasepaint cynicism or camp, or they're a less sardonic Beautiful South, or
they're a Prefab Sprout that never met Thomas Dolby and never loved soul.
They are the kids Elliott Smith and Alanis Morissette grow up to be if
they're born into a different class, on a different island. They write songs
as a combination of emotional self-defense and procrastination, even if, and
perhaps especially when, they're not sure what they're defending against, or
putting off.
And as any first album in this genre must, to be believable, Tigermilk
stumbles at times, but evolution understands that sentimental animals will
be more inclined to nurture their young if they aren't born tap dancing.
Maybe a part of the reason If You're Feeling Sinister eluded me is that I
wanted to feel like it needed my apologies, my cooperation, like it wasn't
quite complete without my complicity in its compromises. "Expectations"
pushes syncopated acoustic guitar, as if it wants to be folk rock, and shiny
horns like the Scots don't understand that there are more than miles between
Baton Rouge and Veracruz, but the lyrics are pure high-school outcast
consolation. "She's Losing It" could be vintage girl-group strut, except the
fluttery chorus is about imminent nervous collapse. The twangy, galloping
"You're Just a Baby" sounds like an earnest Three Dog Night/CCR/Animals
homage performed in plaid school uniforms. "Electronic Renaissance", a
mid-album intermission that will sound wildly out of character if you want
this to be If You're Feeling Sinister's rough draft, but makes perfect sense
if you're expecting Belle and Sebastian to be as distractible as the Field
Mice, is an uncanny synth-pop pastiche somewhere between The The and
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. "I Could Be Dreaming" undercuts resonant
Leslie-spun guitar with reedy mini-synth hooks Wolfie might envy. "We Rule
the School", despite the rebel-anthem title, is staid, baroque chamber-pop.
"You know the world is made for men, / Not us", Stuart sighs, a distinction
I take to be less about machismo and gender than species, a crackly lunar
"One small step for a man" muddled by Armstrong's horror that everyone is
seeing pictures of him in such awful shoes. "My Wandering Days Are Over", a
recap of the frame tale, is half The Byrds, half Bacharach. "I Don't Love
Anyone", which conceals a few tellingly affectionate insights amidst its
denials, sounds to me like the Connells transplanted to Manchester. And
"Mary Jo", after a flute and piano intro, turns into a jangly, generous
epilogue, Murdoch's looping melody circling Isobel Campbell's simple harmony
like a pair-skating routine in which the woman just sits in a chair reading
Gaudy Night. I'm ready to move forward, now. Belatedly, as is the case with
sad frequency, I'm ready to accept the cult this economical record inspired
as my people. Belle and Sebastian may be archivists, more than explorers,
but the historiography they're keeping alive is the catalog of ways in which
scholars are heroes. We are surrounded by wannabe music, themes for suburban
white kids to dress up as ghetto street thugs, vandals to think of
themselves as activists, or boys whose voices haven't changed to be poster
gods. Immersed in the seductive illusion that daily life should feel like
sports highlights, who will still remember what purpose libraries used to
serve before one well-intentioned idiot paid for them to buy computers, and
some other ones invented GeoCities and Hotmail? Belle and Sebastian write
songs for abandoned utopias, or the acuity to recognize a treadmill no
matter who calls it a race, or the presence of mind to stop and ask if a
lost soul is just lonely, or is you.
Marine Research: Sounds From the Gulf Stream
The noble labor of sustaining Sarah Records' legacy is complicated by the
fact that many of the people who created the legacy are still around,
themselves. I don't know what's become of Clare, but Matt has Shinkansen,
his new label, and Blueboy is still putting out records on it, as are
Trembling Blue Stars, who are more or less the Field Mice, and Harvey
Williams, who was the Hitchcock cameo of Sarah artists. I think Boyracer are
nominally defunct, but the same people are making music as Steward and
Empress. The Harvest Ministers and St. Christopher found new labels, a new
East River Pipe album came out this very week, and every pop band in
Australia seems to have at least one former Sugarglider. And Heavenly, of
course, made their last record, my favorite of theirs, after Sarah, and four
fifths of them are now Marine Research. The last fifth was their drummer,
and countless bands have changed drummers or more without giving up on
continuity, but Heavenly wasn't a franchise, and Mathew Fletcher didn't quit
to tour with Procol Harem, he quit to be dead. The rest of what could still
have been Heavenly decided that Mathew's suicide was also the band's, which
is their right, and a touching gesture of solidarity, I think, refreshing
(if anything pertaining to a suicide can be refreshing) as a contrast to the
dubious but customary "He would have wanted us to carry on". Marine Research
are a new band, however much the members' biographies overlap. At least,
that's the theory. The band themselves give every indication of believing
it; Marine Research don't play Heavenly songs in concert, and do not bring
up the connection in their own promotional material. But while I'm sure
someday there will be Marine Research fans who don't know Heavenly, or know
them only in retrospect, for the moment the fiction is incomplete. Scanning
the room at the band's recent Cambridge show, I saw a sea of faces
concentrating furiously on pronouncing "Heavenly" with "m"s and "n"s and
"r"s. It hasn't helped that until very recently the only transportable
mementos of Marine Research's independent existence were a two-song single
charitably characterizable as inconclusive, and a Built to Spill cover on
another split. But a three-song CD-single for "Parallel Horizontal" is now
available, and Sounds From the Gulf Stream was on sale at the show and will
be in stores the week after next. Standing there waiting for Marine Research
to play, holding the copy of the album I'd just bought but not yet heard, I
was about as anxious as I can ever remember being at a concert I was
attending of my own volition. Having developed the conviction that Heavenly
was one of the decade's Important Things, I wanted desperately to support
its authors in their new endeavor, but I had no clear idea of how difficult
that would be. If the "Queen B"/"Y.Y.U.B." single had been by some other
random band, I wouldn't have given them a second thought. I needed to hear
something inspiring, and I needed to go home and hear it again on the album.
As they climbed onto the stage and settled into position, I could hear
Schrodinger's Cat purring on my shoulder. Inside both boxes, the stage and
the album, were pop songs, hovering in a wave-state between adored by me and
not, and I was about to collapse it. And then they played, and everything
turned out to be far simpler than I'd feared. These definitely aren't
Heavenly songs, and if you're prepared to understand the difference as a
function of trauma, you'll have little trouble, but it took absolutely no
abstraction for me to become transfixed.
The show began, or at least begins in my revisionist memory of it, the
same way as the album, with "Parallel Horizontal". Amelia Fletcher sings
like an economist. I realize this isn't the simile to which rock singers
have traditionally aspired, but I empathize with economists much more
intimately than I do with coyotes, for example, and I think it's a grounding
assumption of this sort of pop that I will. Most of Heavenly's brash
bubblegum-punk sparkle is gone, but in its place is a sturdy, self-contained
rock song, propelled by DJ's square drumming, with Amelia's precise lead,
Cathy Rogers' oddly somber nonsense-syllable harmonies, and guitarist Peter
Momtchiloff leaning, Buzzcocks-style, into the choruses. The words "parallel
horizontal" resist the melody, but that's sort of the point of the song, a
couple's postures in bed reduced to symbolic and uncooperative geometry. "A
long gone love never threatening, / Or I would be letting him / Tug T-shirt
and lift", Amelia muses, even her imagined seduction narrated in unappealing
assembly-instruction clarity. Still, "Parallel Horizontal" has a
relationship to fret over; it fades into theory for the methodical 3/4
observer's lament "You and a Girl", whose ascending-scale verse lines sound
to me like a sense-inverted "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things". The
narrator never finds a way out of her tragedy, and the song never quite
locates itself, either, it seems to me. Much as with Kenickie, my personal
experience is that Heavenly and Marine Research songs, whatever styles they
span, basically all rely on performance energy, and when they try to write a
song without it, they do so by instrument, forced to calculate what could
replace energy, because their intuitions are unresponsive. If you made sheet
music for "You and a Girl", it would look like a song. I can hum it from
memory. But it's just data.
But then comes "Hopefulness to Hopelessness", and I no longer care much
if the rest of the record has the rhythmic grace of stenography. Cathy sets
up another wordless loop, which isn't quite as surreal to hear coming off
the disc as I found it to be radiating from center stage without a trace of
self-consciousness. Amelia's verses go at half that speed, and the tension
between the two tempos is as close as Marine Research gets to replicating a
specific Heavenly trick. The rest of the band, when they join in, initially
take up Amelia's pace, but gradually Cathy switches from counterpoint to
harmony, and just when I notice that nobody is holding up the eighth-note
layer, the whole band snaps into double-time. The chorus is cathartic and
soaring, a artlessly straightforward plea for courage. "I still want to hear
you end / Your half-finished pop songs. / I still want to be who I am, / But
be it with you", runs one of the verses, and my guess is that the ambiguity
is intentional: it could be a love song, but it could also be for Mathew, in
which case "I still want to be who I am" hints at an alarmingly lucid
understanding that simply restoring history to its previous state, no
suicide and no awareness of its possibility, would accomplish nothing. In
isolation, all beginning and end states are equivalent; personal growth only
comes from understanding what your role is in converting one to the other.
The muted "Queen B", next, isn't dramatically more thrilling in context
than it was on the single, but as an album transition it doesn't have to be.
"Chucking Out Time", the song that follows, is twinkly and confident, but
displays no unique Marine Research qualities that I can hear, the jazz-pop
mannerisms towards the end particularly (and mysteriously) anonymous. The
song that puzzled me most in concert, "Glamour Gap", is eerie and enticing
on disc, built on a guitar riff that sounds like the Pixies doing
spaghetti-western, a tangle of distorted dialogue samples and another
breathy duet between Amelia and Cathy, but the source of my confusion was
watching the two women perform it. It's a rather bitter song about not being
conventionally beautiful, and not being willing to fake beauty artificially.
All Marine Research songs are sung as if they're from Amelia's point of view
(as were Heavenly songs, which produced some odd results when they were
Mathew's lyrics), and in this case, at least the night I saw them, Amelia
played the narrator's role perfectly, with a short, boyish haircut and
attention-deflecting clothes. Cathy Rogers, however, is gorgeous in socially
established ways, strikingly blonde, fit, and dressed for this show in a
tight, stomach-exposing T-shirt. She didn't look made-up, and when I saw
her, later, out from behind her keyboard in weird knee socks, I realized
that her complete outfit wasn't that much more glamorous than Amelia's, so
the song didn't seem to be wholly directed at her, but I couldn't help feel
that she had been coerced into participating in a diatribe for which she was
also part of the audience.
"At the Lost and Found", jittery and frayed, is the closest the record
comes to punk, the choruses reminding me very much of Lush. "Venn Diagram"'s
brittle rhythm and spindly guitar sound like a cross between Prince and the
Wedding Present. "End of the Affair" attempts an odd Latin squirm, complete
with castanets. And "Y.Y.U.B.", the single's b-side pressed into service as
the record's final track, feints towards a big, surging finale, but then
decides against it, and instead of making an explosive exit, the album
simply creaks to a halt. By Heavenly's standards, ten songs in thirty-six
minutes constitutes a weighty collection; The Decline and Fall of Heavenly
supplies only eight in twenty-five. But The Decline and Fall... feels to me
like the band set out to make an normal-size album, and only realized at the
end that eight of their quick, compact songs don't quite add up to Permanent
Waves. Sounds From the Gulf Stream seems less comfortable with itself, like
writing for Marine Research is still difficult for them, perhaps like
writing songs at all is still somewhat painful. I think if I were editing, I
would have told them they weren't ready for an album yet. Getting five good
songs out of ten tries is a very respectable ratio, and if it took six more
to get to eight, that's only a matter of months until they'd have a record
that could make people forget Heavenly. Then again, I don't want to forget
Heavenly, and despite their bluff, I don't believe that Marine Research do,
either. This album is inevitably about recovery, and if you want to
demonstrate any of recovery's lessons, you have to show the intermediate
steps. Holding out for another perfect pop record would have amounted to
pretending that Mathew's death didn't change their goals. The five songs I
don't care as much for, and we'll pretend for a moment that my reactions are
indicative, are actually the courageous ones, the songs in which Mathew's
friends try to work out the new implications of life without him, try to
decide on methods of living that are based on their love for him, try to
sustain all his essential qualities, including, because an honest tribute
must, his resignation.
Copyright (c) 1999, glenn mcdonald
The War Against Silence is published weekly at www.furia.com/twas, and
posted to the newsgroup rec.music.reviews. It may not be distributed
elsewhere without my explicit permission.