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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Belle & Sebastian at the Ace Hotel

October 7, 2014 by Scott Timberg

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FOR a band known early on for playing downbeat folk songs and spending a lot of time onstage tuning their instruments, Glasgow’s Belle & Sebastian have become one of the most reliably engaging, even restorative, live bands on the planet. Last night’s show at the theater at LA’s newish Ace Hotel was so full of joy and great music — especially striking given that the band was birthed by depression.

Last night’s show was one of a handful of US dates in which the group gets ready to tour on a new album — GIrls in Peacetime Want to Dance — that comes out in the winter. The evening showed what a wide-ranging tool-kit they have these days: Guitarist Stevie Jackson made a joke about how they were going to strain to play more than just Velvet Underground-influenced folk songs, but they’ve got the ability to to intimate and expansive, brooding and celebratory — in a mix of chamber-pop and rockers — and still sound like themselves.

They played with a small string section and horn player for some numbers and stripped down for others. Guitars and players were switched out so often that it seemed like each song had its own blend of musicians and instruments. Some of the numbers were accompanied bv short films or photos; mostly it worked, and we may see more of this since the band’s founder is now an acclaimed indie filmmaker.

They played songs from across their career, including a lot of early stuff — Photo Jenny, Suki in the Graveyard, The Boy With the Arab Strap. For the last two of these, singer Stuart Murdoch invited a few people to come onstage and dance, but it soon got very crowded. “It’s like playing a gig in a bus station!” the wiry/ blond vegetarian frontman shouted.

220px-WriteaboutloveA few songs in, Murdoch bounded into the audience, asked the crowd who had the worst day. The winner would get to pick the next song. A bespectacled, Smiths-y looking guy in front of me talked about being dumped by a girlfriend who exchanged him for his best friend (I think I have that right), and then requested the strummy “Piazza, New York Catcher.”

The group originated during a seven-year-stretch of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Murdoch; he emerged from it thanks to music and church-going. A school assignment led to his forming a band and recording Tigermilk, which became the first B&S record, released in a very small batch in the UK and then, after the group found fame, a few years later in the US.

The tension between Murdoch’s introversion (I bumped into him briefly before the show) and the group’s communal cheer is part of what makes their performances so complex and resonant. He really gives of himself onstage; you feel a kind of conspiratorial thrill just being there.

So overall, this was as good a show as I’ve seen this year, and it’s always reassuring when a band you love plays with commitment and freshness a decade and a half after starting out. Caveats: I would have liked to hear more of Jackson’s reverb-drenched guitar. I also would have loved to hear some of my favorites — Lazy Line Painter Jane, The Blues Are Still Blue, I Want the World to Stop. (Like Wilco, they have so many good songs they can play a full set and leave a bunch out.)

The two or three new songs they played seemed to me mixed; maybe I’m still adjusting to them and to their less guitar-based sound. And no man should go onstage with a keytar. (I am just glad that Murdoch, who joked with Jackson about his love for Lionel Richie’s All Night Long, did not break into the Miami Vice Theme.)

The encore was Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying. By that point, I was really wishing I could come back for Tuesday’s show. They are Britain’s greatest band, I think, and remain an absolute delight live. I’d had a shitty few days — including having my car totaled thanks to an incompetent driver — but left feeling benevolent and lucky to live in the same world as Belle & Sebastian.

 

 

Filed Under: Belle & Sebastian, brit culture, indie, Los Angeles

Comments

  1. william osborne says

    October 7, 2014 at 5:03 pm

    Here’s a quick sample of Belle & Sebastian lyrics (separated by asterisks.) Excerpts, but I didn’t see much more meaning in the whole. How to describe it? The focus seems to be on the suburban alienation of teenagers. Like the texts, the music seemed a bit adolescent. I’m always left with the assumption that I must be missing something. That they find complexity in “introversion and communal cheer” sounds interesting, but I don’t really see it. (Thoreau express that sentiment well.) Ironically, due to my lack of appreciation, I feel left out, something the band sings about since it’s a pretty common teenager emotion. I’m hope I’m not being an asshole for writing about my bafflement. I just wonder how one goes from Richard Linkletter or David Mitchell and other fairly deep questions about culture to music and lyrics like this.

    I know where the summer goes
    When you’re having no fun
    When you’re under the thumb
    I know where the summer dwells
    If your underarm smells
    And your kitchen looks like hell
    *****

    I don’t love anyone
    You’re not listening
    You’re playing with something
    You’re playing with yourself

    I don’t love anyone
    You’re not listening even now
    You’re playing with someone
    You’re playing with someone else
    ******

    When she got back, her spirituality was thrown into confusion
    So she got a special deal on renting
    From the man at Rediffusion
    “Look at me! I’m on TV
    It makes up for the shortcomings of being poor
    ******

    We lay on the bed there
    Kissing just for practice
    Could we please be objective?
    ‘Cause the other boys are queuing up behind us
    A hand over my mouth
    A hand over the window
    Well, if I remain passive and you just want to cuddle
    Then we should be ok, and we won’t get in a muddle
    Cause we’re seeing other people
    At least that’s what we say we are doing

  2. Scott Timberg says

    October 7, 2014 at 7:20 pm

    I think literary analysis of lyrics is the least useful way to assess a rock band.

    I love that song, though much of it has to do with non=language factors. What matters is how the words sound sung, and in this case there all all kinds of quiet echoes that are hard to detect while reading them cold on the page.

    • william osborne says

      October 7, 2014 at 8:10 pm

      Thanks. I check out the songs on YouTube and listen from a more complete perspective.

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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