Month of February , 2006

Belle and Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
2006 | Matador

Download Track 2, "Another Sunny Day", courtesy of Matador Records.

My first exposure to Belle and Sebastian was tooling around in a beat-up car on summer evenings by the ocean with a wreck of a girl, a friend of mine who was love sick and sinking herself into drugs. She had a mix tape of Belle and Sebastian tunes from her unrequiting which she played constantly (along with a Frank Zappa mix, but that's for another time), tunes from If You're Feeling Sinister and The Boy with the Arab Strap. It was one of those summers where you just seemed trapped in between things - my friends and I all shared some combination of no money, no love, no place to live, but the weather was nice.

At the time I loved listening to the band on those drives, humming along to "Like Dylan In The Movies," but going back later to If You're Feeling Sinister, I wasn't so crazy about them. Hit or miss, it seemed, and lead singer Stuart Murdoch's tendency to lisp made my skin crawl no matter how much I liked "The Boy with the Arab Strap."

The Life Pursuit is an amazing example is how a band can mature, and still display some of those traits that had you loving them and wincing years ago. Except that there's far less wincing these days and I find myself a bit in awe.

With the exception of one or two numbers on the record that I can't stand to listen to (I've yet to allow "To Be Myself Completely" to play on my stereo since the first time), the singing on this record is beautiful. At times there's still the softly-sung dreamy vocals of "Stars of Track and Field," but they're on pitch and "Dress Up In You" is the band showing off how they've mastered their old sound.

The band spends most of the record singing with bold confidence. And while the band has retained, nay amplified, their 60's dream-pop sound, and at times the super-shiny sweetness can be a bit much, there's no denying the strength of the songs on the record. Hoo-ray for pop music! The new sound is full of swing, blues riffs, vibraphones, and even some tearing guitars.

The songs of The Life Pursuit bear a beautiful, melancholy appreciation for love, or the feeling of being without it, and having sympathy and kindness. Which is apparently just what we all need - more sympathy. Nonetheless, there's something quite touching listening to the opening track, about a young lady who bears the trouble of the world on her shoulders (you never find out what the trouble really is), putting her head down on her desk, feeling a patch of sun on her neck and escaping to dream. Later in the record, the reprise "Act of the Apostle II" is a soft record of rejection:

She asked the man if the service was open
"Not today, just the choir from the radio"
"Couldn't I sit in? I've come all this way"
"Will you bugger off, I've got work to do."

As I remember of some of the earlier B&S records, the lyrics are not obviously or immediately autobiographical, tending to tell stories through characters that are not the singer. This is quite a nice breather from today's norm of super-introspection.

The album booklet itself is rather keen; most of the content (aside from the lyrics and photographs) seems to come from the Q&A section of the band's website, and is full of rather cheeky commentary that gives a nice insight into the personalities of the members and how they approach their music. Accompanying the Q&A and pictures of the band (and also photos of some pretty girls by Stuart) are the lyrics - I wish more bands made sure you got the lyrics.

All in all, a really great record.

If you're looking to pick up The Life Pursuit online, you can buy it as mp3s from karmadownload.com. I recommend picking up the disc itself, coming from someone who prefers to hang on to album artwork. [ Amazon | Insound (also as LP) ]

A nice little New York publication wrote an article about the East Village that really hit home for me.

http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Continental_divides_in_East_Village/1216.html

I spent most of my high school and college years with my buddies Jimmy O and O'Brien hopping PATH trains at all hours and going to most of the haunts described in this article. Still being underage, we'd get bottles of snapple and spike them with whatever we had available -- airline bottles of vodka, our college stash of Goldschlager (not recommended), Jameson's, etc. and head into town. Some nights we'd sit in Cafe Creole's basement bar on MacDougal listening to roots reggae and sipping Buds, our reward for being the only white boys with the gall to come sit at the bar.

But most importantly, we'd go to shows. We'd see Snapcase, Lagwagon, Face To Face, H20, Sick of It All, Scarab, One True Thing, E Town Concrete, Fury of Five etc., and we'd usually see them at Continental. Granted, there were occasional shows at Coney Island High or CB's, but CB's was more like the place where your friend's shitty band could get a gig in town if they couldn't play elsewhere and Coney Island High closed too soon or was reserved for better shows -- like Murphy's Law or Agnostic Front. Continental was the everyday place. It was where you could go on Sunday when nothing else was going on and catch the matinee and some hot dogs nearby. You could go bumming around Sounds or Generation Records, see a show, find a bar dank enough to slip you a few every now and again (thanks 7B) and walk it off until near sunrise.

I'm not going to lament the loss of Continental any more than I lament Connections, Coney or CB's. It's just a venue and a sign that things are changing. I WILL, however, add my voice to the argument against tearing the soul out of the village. I know Warhol's cronies bemoaned the birth of punk and the closure of Max's Kansas City, I know the disco people bemoaned the death of Studio 54 and I'm more than aware of the club kids' angst toward not only the closing of places like NASA, Tunnel and Limelight but toward the corporatization and financial elitism of the NYC club scene (Bungalow 8 doesn't mix club kids and Cristal). But I'm not talking about the death of a genre or any one specific lifestyle -- I'm talking about stripping the art, bohemianism and intellectualism from a place that was once a hotbed of it. People don't mourn the 2nd Avenue Deli because it was an INSTITUTION. They bemoan it because it was a gathering place that took on sentimental value because of its populist nature -- all the artists, musicians and writers could gather and eat there alongside LES families and it became part of the community. It's something a McDonald's, Starbucks, Jamba Juice or even Chickpea can ever be. By stripping back the independent businesses, by taking out the culture, you make the place into a mall... a movie set for NYU kids and tourists to play on.

Over the last decade, I've watched a punitive assault on creativity and the arts in that general area. I've had to hear people talk about how they'd travelled MILES to come to the St. Mark's Poetry Project, which was founded by people who lived around the corner. I have to read things about how performers at the fountain in Washington Square will have to get the boot so the fountain can be moved a few feet over -- for aesthetics!!! I watch the Bottom Line get bought out by NYU, the whole of Bleecker Street taken over by cover bands, art studios pushed from SoHo into Chelsea stockhouses, meatpacking plants and working class bars and venues pushed out of the Meatpacking District in favor of high-end boutiques. It's all turning into a mall, and all I hear from people standing outside it is that "that's why I hate it here."

Fuck you, pal. Let's say you move it on down to, oh, Philly, where their arts and music scene is blowing up. Do you really think they won't be dealing with the same problem five years from now? This is how gentrification works. An area becomes economically depressed, usually because the old inhabitants start dying off or industry leaves. Artists take up residence because rent is cheap. Galleries open, poetry groups are formed, bars host shows, writers write, dancers dance, a good time is had by all... save a few muggings, break ins, drops of urine in the streets and vermin. People start taking notice of how "hip" the neighborhood is. They begin moving in and telling friends, becoming barhopping pseudointellectuals who talk a big game but don't actually contribute anything. They, with their expendable income (which the artists certainly don't have) draw the attention of developers, who see how the area has been made safe for white people and want part of the action. Rents go up, historic buildings become condos and, just like that, the neighbors start to hate everything that made them move there in the first place: the music's too loud, the food's too smelly, the bars have too many drunks, the streets are too dirty and everybody's a bit too "socialist." More German cars show up, more artists start moving out and, suddenly, it's a neighborhood of Financial District workers with movie posters on their walls checking their portfolios at Panera Bread. This may be where the village is heading.

My question to everybody isn't "how do we stop it?" It can't be stopped. It's "which place is next and how can we defend it." Maybe Jim can weigh in on this, given that he's scene both Hoboken and Williamsburg go through the same process and has made a living off knowing where it's happening now. My money, at least on our side of the river, is Asbury Park. Tons of new venues opening, lots of artists... and an impending, city-changing condo project on the horizon. I assert that anyone worth his or her artistic salt in this state has at one point or another had something to do with Asbury Park.

But where from there? I hear rumblings in Newark, but the artistic output isn't such to substantiate it. While a center of black culture in our state, it has yet to become the celebration of black culture that is Atlanta or was New Orleans. Paterson is nowhere near ready for prime time. Queens, you say? Astoria seems to have skipped the artistic requirement and gone straight to the gentrification. Harlem and the Bronx seem like healthy bets, especially considering that there's still a hesitancy on the part of the mainstream to have anything to do with either of them. Billy's had a bit more uptown experience of late and may be able to shed some light on things. I know only one thing: It ain't Montclair.