Word: albums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...myself to God, there was a pregnant pause before he said OK. Now I spend my days turning tables round in Marks & Spencer's, they don't seem to mind." The narrator is less whiny than smug to point out his faults and the faults of others. Further, this album creates a closed circuit of a world. The last track references the first (It finds a young girl reading the book, The State...
Earlier on the album, Belle and Sebastian nod to the Smiths. While one of the tracks on Arab Strap is explicitly about the record label representative who signed Johnny Marr from the Smiths, on "Electronic Renaissance" the chorus is a revisited version of the Smith's "Panic." Gently mocking many of the current pop bands who have incorporated sophisticated remixing and other mixology, Murdoch sings, "Play a game with your electronics, take a step to the discotheque...Hand in hand with the Electronic Renaissance is the way to go, you're learning, soon you will do the things you wanted...
...recording quality on Tigermilk has been enhanced, seemingly to counteract the multiple bootleg copies of the album floating around (I had one myself; it is worth purchasing the re-release). Originally a marketing project of sorts, Belle and Sebastian's first record should hold up well five years after its creation...
...beat sound seems complete, even if record companies still insist on referring to it as "electronica." It would have been easy for its inventors to once again mix up rock sounds and dance beats and recreate their success. The Chemical Brothers' (a.k.a. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons) third full album, however, moves away from the through-the-roof lager madness of Dig Your Own Hole to a more house-based sound, one that's perhaps less accessible than their earlier rocktinged efforts. In a way, it's a roots album for the Chemicals, recalling the influences of Kraftwerk and early...
Despite the addictive four-on-the-floor quality of the single, however, Surrender is not especially focused on partying but on extending the scope of sounds. For example, "The Sunshine Underground," the album's halfway point, anchors the album with eight minutes of instrumental music, moving from an Indian-tinged opening to an insistent, psychedelic loop. The album closes with "Dream On" (featuring Jonathan Donahue of college radio favorites Mercury Rev), an impossibly beautiful song that begins with delicate guitar strumming before soaring into its synthesizer refrain: the perfect comedown after too many electric highs...