You'd think that for a cover story about Belle & Sebastian, Magnet magazine would hire someone who could write. I rarely buy music magazines, but the July/August issue of Magnet has Belle & Sebastian singer Stuart Murdoch on its cover, in a flannel tie. I was drawn to the glossy thing like a fly toward a shit stick.
The article's author, Mark Blackwell, is a fan of Belle & Sebastian and of music-journalistclichés, which is an odd combo, since the excellent thing about Murdoch's songs is that they are allergic to cliché. Blackwell is fond of the second person ("But you just happen to have an all-access pass...") and of that tired this-is-so-frickin'-hardcore tone ("the elusive and exclusive after-after-after-party"). He loads up on adjectives and references and then just stirs them together into soup: the band "precociously blended the bright and shiny progressiveness of '60s folk/pop with the dark, lonely catharsis of Nick Drake and the limber artsiness of the Velvet Underground—along with choice bits of everything from Joy Division to the Archies—to craft the sublime Tigermilk." Whenever Blackwell's on his way to an idea, he stops himself, switches tracks, goes the other way. The latest album "shines with a brighter and more shimmery pop vibe, mixed with harder-driving rhythms and a touch of smoothish soul, but the LP doesn't radically depart from the band's previous offerings in any glaring way." Except, you know, the brighter and more shimmery pop vibe and the harder-driving rhythms.
Murdoch rarely grants interviews, but whenever he says something smart or genuinely startling, Blackwell doesn't seem to be paying attention. When Murdoch offers that the difference between the songs he's written about real people and the songs he's written about made-up people is that the songs about made-up people always end up "slightly more trite," Blackwell weighs in with a non sequitur about how the band's audience has changed.
What Murdoch and the rest of the band deserve is an intelligent journalist, which they had in Paul Whitelaw. Whitelaw's 300-page Belle and Sebastian: Just a Modern Rock Story was published last fall; no one except me noticed. It's packed with anecdotes about interpersonal histrionics, which do get boring. But it's also packed with analysis—of the "twee" accusation; of Scots in general; of Murdoch's religious motifs; of the incongruities between lyric and tune; of literary, political, and sexual meaning. Every song gets a close reading—and, sometimes, a dressing down. I've always loved the homo references in the lyrics—everyone in the band is straight—but Whitelaw questions "flirting with this kind of gay chic." He wonders if songwriter Murdoch is "trying a little too hard, like two 16-year-old girls snogging in a pub in an attempt to shock the clientele, who probably couldn't care less, frankly. In treating homosexuality as a kind of bohemian vice in his songs, something titillating and illicit, [Murdoch] threatens to display the kind of unintentional prejudices so common to well-meaning liberals." It's interesting. I'd never thought of that.
