Great Expectations: B&S Release a Prequel

"Slackers? Hardly. The so-called Generation X turns out to be full of go-getters who are just doing it-but their way."

So read the self-conscious liner notes to Tigermilk, Belle and Sebastian's 1995 first album, recently re-released on the recently re-independent Matador Records.

Well not really. In truth, those lines come from a two-year old Time Magazine article, invoked recently by public-policy advocate Ted Halstead. The article and Halstead both seek to alter that common image branded upon those born between 1965 to 1978, Generation X. Enough to make anyone schizophrenic, Generation Xers first had to face their parents' scorn as lazy, slothful, ungrateful children, and more recently are stereotyped as innovative go-getters, technology mavens and upstart venture capitalists. Yet for the Glasgow-based ensemble, who are garnering quite a following on both sides of the Atlantic, the duality almost makes sense.

Just about five years ago, some young fellows enrolled in a music business course at Stow College collaborated with a group of Scottish musicians to produce an album and release 1,000 copies. The group, which was later signed to a British and then American label, have rapidly put out two LPs and four EPs (members in the band pressing two additional full-length albums as side-projects). In the quasi-fascist recording environment of label-dominated markets, this is almost unheard of production.

Though bands marketed for a college audience are not ruled by the top-40 station formula-create pop hit, flood market, wait for other pop hit-Belle and Sebastian and a number of college bands are constantly crossing over into the larger sea of alternative/main-stream pop. With the success of the group's previous two albums, The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998) and If You're Feeling Sinister (1997), Matador is bold enough to officially release the first album, which late last year was going at auctions for more than $600. Both were acclaimed by music and fashion magazines alike, and a new album will potentially follow Tigermilk next year.

With such a breakneck schedule, one would expect the music of Belle and Sebastian to mirror many independent domestic projects in poor recording quality, sloppy production and slackerly filler material. Instead, lyrics and music form an almost hyper-aesthetic experience--carefully produced, with fine-tuned instrumentation and clever lyrics. The singer Stuart Murdoch softly whispers phrases about the uncertain nineties with an approach reminiscent of the '70s poet-singer Nick Drake. The instrumentation includes a trumpet, cello, flute and beautiful keyboard that unite in complex harmoniousness.

Most characteristic of the band is its sincere and quiet intensity. Opposite Murdoch sings the delicate Isobel Campbell, who also showcases the cello. The bass playing of Stuart David weaves into the vocal sound and serves less as rhythm and more to balance the tender melody.

This holds true for Tigermilk as much as it does for Belle and Sebastian's more recent work. Many of the songs, intensely personal, describe states of being and moods of troubled 20-year-olds. Yet far from being self-indulgent fluff, a perceptive and sharp wit prevents the songs from growing tiresome. On the opening track, Murdoch confides, "The priest in the booth had a photographic memory for all he had heard. He took all of my sins, and he wrote a pocket novel called The State I Am In. And so I gave myself to God, there was a pregnant pause before he said OK. Now I spend my days turning tables round in Marks & Spencer's, they don't seem to mind." The narrator is less whiny than smug to point out his faults and the faults of others. Further, this album creates a closed circuit of a world. The last track references the first (It finds a young girl reading the book, The State I Am In).

When Murdoch seems not to be singing about himself, he follows many British bands in offering character sketches and social critique. Much of Tigermilk offers portraits of other young men and women who are most likely Generation Xers, from a young dreamer, Mary Jo, to a pair of lesbian lovers, Lisa and Chelsea on "She's Losing It." As elsewhere, these figures are reading books, skating pirouettes and riding buses as hobbies.

Tigermilk also references quite a bit of musical history, one of the strongest shaping factors of a post-punk generation. On "I Don't Love Anyone," in a sense speaking to Lou Reed, Murdoch tells of meeting a strange man who told him, "The world is soft as lace." The singer replies, "There's always somebody saying something." Herein lies the obligatory generational angst: a reversal of "Sweet Jane." Of course, there is also "Expectations," a song about a woman in a dead-end job; she is said to have a hobby of making life-size statues of the Velvet Underground.

Earlier on the album, Belle and Sebastian nod to the Smiths. While one of the tracks on Arab Strap is explicitly about the record label representative who signed Johnny Marr from the Smiths, on "Electronic Renaissance" the chorus is a revisited version of the Smith's "Panic." Gently mocking many of the current pop bands who have incorporated sophisticated remixing and other mixology, Murdoch sings, "Play a game with your electronics, take a step to the discotheque...Hand in hand with the Electronic Renaissance is the way to go, you're learning, soon you will do the things you wanted since you were wearing glitter badges." The chorus sounds a critique of both musical and artistic minimalism, cold and synthetic: "Monochrome in the 1990s, you go disco and I'll go my way." Yet with Murdoch born in 1968, David in '69 and other members with birth dates scattered through the early '70s, one wonders whether both Belle and Sebastian were dreaming of glitter badges growing up.

Other songs on Tigermilk are politically conscious in an apolitical, '90s way. The band sings about the dangers of abusive relationships, as well as the continual Generation X fear of joblessness. (The real liner notes of Tigermilk read, "Sebastian is older than he looks. If he didn't play music, he would be a bus driver or be unemployed. Probably unemployed.")

The recording quality on Tigermilk has been enhanced, seemingly to counteract the multiple bootleg copies of the album floating around (I had one myself; it is worth purchasing the re-release). Originally a marketing project of sorts, Belle and Sebastian's first record should hold up well five years after its creation.

But then again, five years can do quite a bit for many things, even notions of generational stereotypes.