Belle & Sebastian is a really great and interesting band that Todd Solondz uses quite a bit. They did the entire score to "Storytelling" and their music sort of fits Solondz's movies. They came out with several albums including "Tigermilk", "If You're Feeling Sinister", "The Boy with the Arab Strap" and "Fold Your Hands, You Walk Like A Peasant". Yes, they have very original album titles. If you haven't heard them, you should really check them out.
love the "Tigermilk" cd. Mary Jo and We Rule The School are personal favs.
They also got some free publicity in High Fidelity (although not as much as the Beta Band). My favorite of theirs is If You're Feeling Sinister. I rue the day I decided not to see their show last summer.
Yeah, I really like "We Rule the School" as well but I think that my favorite album of thiers is "If You're Feeling Sinister". There are about 7 really great songs on there.
"if you're feeling sinister" and "fold your hand you walk like a peasant" are my 2 favorite albums. i was lucky enough to see them live in detroit last year. currently, that show is number 1 in my all time top 5 best shows ever list! goddamn! they're a good band! they totally do not have the credit they deserve in america.
I just heard their song "The Chalet Lines". It's dark, but really wonderful. One of their best.
I as well like B&S.
Quote from: SoNowThenI as well like B&S.
Here's a story...
A belle walked up to a sebastian.
THE END
ha ha ha! :lol:
Quote from: GhostboyThey also got some free publicity in High Fidelity (although not as much as the Beta Band). My favorite of theirs is If You're Feeling Sinister. I rue the day I decided not to see their show last summer.
One of the best shows of recent years. I posted somewhere else about seeing them in Portland 09/12/2001, which I'll never forget...
I agree with Meatwas about favorite songs. Best overall album is
Fold Your Hands, Child, but my favorite piece of their work is the
3, 6, 9... Seconds of Light EP. And I swear it's not because of the sexy cover (I find that Stuart Murdoch an EXTREMELY attractive fellow, and they don't use band pictures for the most part!).
Apparently, their next effort will be produced by Trevor Horn of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and t.A.T.U. fame... :?:
I really like this cover.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.noisedfisk.com%2Fmumweb%2Fphotos%2FJPR010.jpg&hash=46c170db489cc22ee1dd97d6e7cf20de5b6d1a17)
These twins are so cute! They are Kirstin and gyda of múm
I know where you can order a poster of that cover. It's a poster advertising their "Fold Your Hands" album. You can buy it here...
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y04Y4641757Y0582427/104-4830542-1804750
thanks, filmcritic
What is the best B&S website out there?
www.belleandsebastian.co.uk/home -- their official site is filled with cool junk like one of the member's journals (can't remember who) and a Q&A where they answer lots of questions
I like this one a lot too...http://jeepster.co.uk/belleandsebastian/
by the way, in case people weren't aware, B&S are touring three US cities in late august (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), and Bright Eyes is opening for them, so it should be fairly outstanding.
Anyone pre-ordered this yet?
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deepdiscountcd.com%2Fimages%2Fcovers%2Fcoverm%2F90_99%2F498094.JPG&hash=eec78c77b688d449e0d611eb2ca891b187f4708a)
Rob Sheffield (the only reason to read Rolling Stone) said it was "painfully sincere and tedious," which doesn't sound like them, but I've always been able to trust Sheffield before... anyways, I did pre-order it. Produced by Trevor Horn, of T.a.T.U. and Frankie Goes to Hollywood (?!?!) fame! If it sounds anything like that robotic, mechanical, sterile Frankie stuff, though, I'm tossing it out the window.
does anybody know if bright eyes is opening all the shows?
I'm really looking forward to this new album. I like Belle and Sebastian!
I think I asked this question before but never got an answer: Is it a Belle and Sebastian song playing in the trailer to Storytelling and if so, what's the name of the song? I think it's a mellotron being played and the song might be an instrumental.
I don't think that was B&S. I think that was called "Fiction" by Nathan Larson and Nina Persson, but I'm not positive.
The album release date for the US is 10/7, by the way.
Just picked up their new album. Very cool!
has anybody heard isobel campbell's new solo album? Or any of her albums under The Gentle Waves? When she left the band, it was the end for me. She added something that will be hard to replace, and i think is sadly missed on their newest LP.
Quote from: meatwadhas anybody heard isobel campbell's new solo album? Or any of her albums under The Gentle Waves? When she left the band, it was the end for me. She added something that will be hard to replace, and i think is sadly missed on their newest LP.
Yes, but on the other hand, I think she needed them, or at least A band. The Gentle Waves stuff is pretty cool, but it's a lot of people from Belle and Sebastian lending a hand. This new solo thing is a huge disappointment for me. I like the first song on it- the rest is a lot of very unfocused pseudo-jazz noodling. The new B&S, as equivocal as I may be about it, is far superior to Campbell's new solo record.
Ok, here it is.
"The Life Pursuit", released in the UK/Europe on Feb 6th by Rough Trade Records. Released a day later in the US by our old muckers at Matador Records. Spunk will be fulfilling Australasian duties as usual, with Trama covering Brazil and Toshiba in Japan.
The album tracklisting goes a little something like this:
Act Of The Apostle Part 1
Another Sunny Day
White Collar Boy
The Blues Are Still Blue
Dress Up In You
Sukie In The Graveyard
We Are The Sleepyheads
Song For Sunshine
Funny Little Frog
To Be Myself Completely
Act Of The Apostle Part 2
For The Price Of A Cup Of A Tea
Mornington Crescent
The album will be preceded by a single, "Funny Little Frog", on January 16th. Will it be released in a multitude of bizarre formats? Who knows?
A UK tour has already been announced (although 2nd nights have been added in Manchester and Dublin). Glasgow, London and Manchester are a bawhair off selling out, so if you're planning on getting tickets for those shows you'd better move quickly.
A US tour will be announced shortly. Then Europe. Then maybe Japan and Australia. Ah, the promotional merry-go-round.
Cryptic last bit: There will actually be another B&S album (of sorts) released before "The Life Pursuit". In three weeks in fact. But we can't say what it is for a couple of days.
Chris and Richard are also doing some DJ'ing soon as well, check out the News page on the website for more details.
That's it for now.
Thanks,
Belle and Sebastian.
:yabbse-thumbup: to the US tour
Anyone get a listen to The Life Pursuit yet? I will likely do the Itunes thing in the next day or so unless I get some warning signs.
yes, i love it.
Nice. I was going to download it simply from The Onion's review, but I knew there were a number of B&S fans here so I thought I would throw it out there.
Quote from: modage on February 15, 2006, 03:49:04 PM
yes, i love it.
me too. murdoch's best effort as a singer if you ask me.
"We Are the Sleepyheads" is probably my favorite...when i first heard "Suki in the Graveyard" or "the Blues are still blue" ..i had a hard time believing it was Belle and Sebastian...i guess that's a good sign? good album though
Thanks to those who offered thoughts on the album. I picked it up and it certainly met my expectations out of the gate. I have only been through it twice...can't wait to dive back in after work.
i really like this as well. i don't see why Silly Little Frog couldn't be a hit like that Fastball song was a few years back.
this is my introduction to B&S, so where do i go from here?
FUNNY little frog talks about virgin mary,
fastball's the way talked about two old fellas that went roadtrippin'.
go figure.
Quote from: bigideas on February 23, 2006, 10:42:07 PM
i really like this as well. i don't see why Silly Little Frog couldn't be a hit like that Fastball song was a few years back.
this is my introduction to B&S, so where do i go from here?
If You're Feeling Sinister
if you're feeling sinster is their masterpiece. anyone seeing them on the tour with new pornographers? i'm going monday night at the avalon.
I'm going to see that Isobel chick that used to sing with them on the 12th.
Quote from: JimmyGator on February 25, 2006, 02:41:17 PM
if you're feeling sinster is their masterpiece. anyone seeing them on the tour with new pornographers? i'm going monday night at the avalon.
thursday night at the nokia theatre.
friday night at the nokia theatre.
well it was an incredible incredible show. all the songs i wanted to hear, i heard. it was my first time seeing them...and it was very very good.
excellent! the new pornographers were good, belle & sebastian was amazing. some guys who callled themselves "Matter of Trust" (...) did a hilarious cover of the billy joel song of the same name... good stuff. the venue was fucking sweet but really hot and the douche bags who like to squeeze their way in front of you while they pretend they have friends up front or are just straight-up assholes (like tonight's were) don't like to take showers. whatever.
two people fainted! yay!
no Like Dylan in the Movies for us -- i really wanted to hear it -- but their set was.... immaculate.
HOWEVER...
broken social scene > belle & sebastian.
i didn't get like dylan in the movies, either, but otherwise the setlist was top notch. they opened with what i wanted them to (stars of track and field) and closed with what i wanted em to (judy). they're damn good.
i took samsong the 2nd nite and we got it then, so everything worked out for the best. :yabbse-thumbup:
Word on the street is that Belle and Sebastian are doing a FREE acoustic set at Amoeba in Hollywood tomorrow at 3pm. Be there!
i've tried many times over the past five years to "get into" Belle & Sebastian's music and although some of their songs are very good i finally gave up and concluded that the best thing about them is their album covers.
no offense. :yabbse-lipsrsealed:
I've liked them ever since i heard the title track from "If you're feeling sinister". The song evokes images in my brain that i would've otherwise never put together. The reason i still like them is because of "Song for Sunshine" from their new album. God Damn! Does it make you wanna groove.
Mixing genres in the Bowl
Scottish indie rock band Belle and Sebastian will play a rare concert accompanied by the Philharmonic.
Source: Los Angeles Times
When they started out in the mid-'90s as a project for a college business course, the group of Glaswegian students who called themselves Belle and Sebastian tried to keep things low-key. They named themselves for a French children's TV show, played gigs in churches and libraries, shunned the media and pressed only 1,000 copies — on vinyl — of their debut album.
World domination has hardly been their lot since — their albums sell briskly but hardly vault up the charts. Yet these witty, literate cult favorites are about to score a milestone: Thursday night, they will become the first rockers in a dozen years to get start-to-finish concert accompaniment from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the baton of associate conductor Alexander Mickelthwate. Their show at the Hollywood Bowl, with indie band the Shins opening, will include new orchestrations developed by them and the orchestra.
"We didn't just want to throw the Philharmonic behind some rock group and say, 'Be the backup band,' " says Arvind Manocha, the Bowl's vice president and general manager, who came up with the idea along with his staff. He's been a fan of Belle and Sebastian since he discovered their debut album as a student in England a decade ago.
Manocha is aware that, as the sometimes bloated orchestral performances by "progressive rock" groups in the '70s made clear, the spontaneity and blues idioms of rock don't always meld with prearranged classical charts.
"I'd be lying to say that I have no worries at all," he says. "However, I believe that the challenge is part of what makes each endeavor like this worthwhile — making art should be a challenge."
Although the Phil has played behind nonclassical acts, including Rufus Wainwright and Bebel Gilberto, for a few songs at a time, and Belle and Sebastian has recorded several tracks with strings, Thursday will mark the group's first full-scale band-and-orchestra experience. The Phil's last such gig was in 1994, behind the Moody Blues.
In some ways, Belle and Sebastian is not as clear a match for the orchestra as that band of art rockers. Nor are the shambling Scots as harmonically "edgy" — and thus tied to contemporary classical music — as, say, Radiohead.
But the group's sophistication and its style — a combination of '60s folk, sly, wistful lyrics, and a flirtation with strings and brass that's evoked the label "chamber pop" — make the addition of orchestrations look, at the very least, like an intriguing experiment.
Manocha calls them "a group of musicians interested in taking their music in different directions."
"They wanted to show their audience that an orchestra isn't just something your parents listen to but a large and complicated organism that can do a lot of different things," he says. "We knew they'd use the orchestra wisely."
What convinced Belle and Sebastian to take the chance here?
"Just the words 'Hollywood Bowl' and 'Los Angeles Philharmonic,' " trumpeter and bassist Mick Cooke says by phone from Glasgow. "Once those words were spoken, that was enough for us."
The Bowl, Cooke says, has a huge mystique in Britain because of the Beatles and Monty Python albums recorded there. Thursday will be a one-off, and the group's only West Coast stop on a three-city visit to the States.
"A lot of our songs were conceived with orchestral instruments as part of their sound," Cooke says, even if the conceptions went unrealized. Keyboardist Chris Geddes is a Bartók fan, and other band members, including leader Stuart Murdoch, are interested in orchestrated '60s pop. Cooke loves the way orchestration "really sends things home."
Still, they've never been able to do a full concert that way. So even though they've recorded some songs with strings, as on 2003's "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" CD, they can't always create the right instrumental textures live. Take a song from "Waitress" called "Lord Anthony."
"At the Hollywood Bowl," Cooke says, "we'll be able to do that song the way we originally intended it — as a Sinatra-type thing, just singer and orchestra. On the record, we messed up the original intention. It's good to get a second stab at it."
The Philharmonic's musicians, meanwhile, instead of resenting the booking for trivializing their talents or bracing themselves for music with nothing in common with Beethoven or Brahms, seem to be looking forward to the gig.
Violist Dana Hansen, for instance, says she's "totally excited" and has enjoyed going back to her Belle and Sebastian records to refresh her memory.
"The Bowl's going to be full — a big audience of people who are really excited," says Hansen, at 27 one of the Phil's youngest members. "And some of that will rub off on the orchestra."
Neither she nor the other musicians are particularly daunted by the new charts, she says, since instrumental pieces based on pop or rock songs are usually not complicated, and, in the two years she's been at the Philharmonic, they've played difficult contemporary works by György Ligeti, a Minimalism festival and even video game music.
Wagner is also way scarier, Hansen says, and cellist Ben Hong agrees. He adds that he gets worried when contemporary music shows up on a program but not rock.
"John Adams pieces are tricky rhythmically," he says, "and contemporary composers take advantage of the full range of an instrument's capability." With Belle and Sebastian, "I plan to enjoy the concert along with everybody else."
So why, with an appreciative audience — the Bowl is almost sold out — and a willing bunch of musicians, has it taken so long for the pop-savvy Phil to accompany a full-scale rock show again?
A lot of it, says the Bowl's Manocha, comes down to the "vicissitudes of scheduling. Orchestral scheduling can be set up years ahead of time, rock bands at the very last minute."
Not to mention pop's fortunes can rise and fall dramatically in a short period.
"Getting all the stars to align," he says, "doesn't always happen."
saw them today for free at battery park. they are awesome.
Quote from: MacGuffin on July 04, 2006, 04:31:06 PM
Mixing genres in the Bowl
Scottish indie rock band Belle and Sebastian will play a rare concert accompanied by the Philharmonic.
I went to this last night (with site member Xerxes). It was amazing. I'd never seen them live before, and now I'm spoiled. They played for a solid 2.5 hours...I don't know how Stuart Murdoch kept going there towards the end...his energy level was astounding.
Damn!
I'm seeing them a week from monday!
Reading that really got me psyched, gb!
Carey Mulligan Jumps Behind the Mic with Belle & Sebastian
Source: Cinematical
Do you need another reason to love Carey Mulligan? Or, more argue-power behind why she should headline My Fair Lady if it ever comes to be?
In the last few years Carey Mulligan has exploded from one of the girls from Pride & Prejudice, and a guest actress in Doctor Who's popular "Blink," to the Oscar-nominated actress from An Education, and name from the likes of Public Enemies and Brothers, plus the upcoming Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Never Let Me Go, Drive, and On Chesil Beach.
Just to continue the ever-brightening spotlight, Mulligan has grabbed the mic to sing with Belle & Sebastian in their new single, "Write About Love," from their CD of the same name.
BBC America spotted the song, a '60s-ish pop tune that her educated Jenny would've loved. It's spunky and pretty darned addictive. Though it details a girl stuck in a crappy day job who escapes to the roof, looks over the city, and wants to write about love and "see the dream through the windows and the trees of your living room," let's hope Mulligan sticks with her big-screen work ... at least until she headlines as a pop princess on the big screen.
The song, which you can download for free right here (http://promo.roughtraderecords.com/belleandsebastian/write-about-love-hq.mp3) (and should, because it's pretty great), definitely proves Mulligan's singing talents, although it also makes me wish that if My Fair Lady gets cooking again, it could be a modern or '60s retro pop version with new songs. Lady isn't the original story anyway -- it's ripped from Pygmalion -- so one can dream.
Should Mulligan be My Fair Lady? Is there another singer she should play? Stevie Nicks might be a little off her range, but maybe ... The Go-Go's? It's not the best cinematic story, but I'd love to see Mulligan, and maybe Zooey Deschanel, partake in some pop frolicking. Do you have any better ideas?
Don't think Glee. It seems she told Vogue that she wants to pop by the popular show, "but I'm told I'm not famous enough to be a cameo."