BELLE & SEBASTIAN
Push Barman To Open Old Wounds
Jeepster/Matador
· It’s like reliving my entire 20s (so far) in 90 minutes – and where I’ve aged, the music hasn’t.
Comparing Belle & Sebastian with The Smiths is easy. Cultish, stubborn and smart, both bands built their legendary status from the inside out. Besides the overwhelming personality of Morrissey, or Belle & Sebastian’s initial enveloping of theirs under a shroud of mystery, the music of both groups was set permanently at top-notch, often most notably on their non-album EPs and singles.
While it’s easy to suspect a between-album EP as an odds-and-sods collection of extra songs that just didn’t fit anywhere else, Belle & Sebastian have approached each of these bite-sized projects as every bit as important. That a stunner like "Slow Graffiti" would be tucked away at the end of the This Is Just A Modern Rock Song EP isn’t just a shot at exclusionary fans-only indie cred, but a prize for anyone willing to look for it. Collected here in chronological order, all seven of B&S’s EPs recorded for the Jeepster label sound like a songwriter’s handbook – this is how you do it and this is how you do it right.
As a demonstration of their development, Push Barman turns the spotlight on both of B&S’s departed songwriters, Isabelle Campbell and Stuart David, first with the former’s lovely (but disposable) "The Gate," and then with the latter’s sugar-sweet "Winter Wooskie." But the show’s admittedly all Stuart Murdoch’s. The poet laureate of the indie rock sect, few but Murdoch could place the literate piano ballad "Marx & Engels" next to the daft Dixieland shuffle of "I Love My Car" and get away with it. Shouting out to Kerouac on "open roads of eucalyptus Westward bound" over-top a swinging ’60s tune I haven’t been able to get out of my head for eight years now ("Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie"), Murdoch may have even written his own fitting epitaph.
They could’ve been A-sides – each and every one of them.
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