Second Chance:
Belle & Sebastian
If You’re Feeling Sinister
1996
Bands are inevitably judged by the debut album- it’s a mission statement, breakthrough and labor of love all in one. But what of the sophomore album? Often dismissed as filler albums, does the second release really deserve that? Our ongoing series takes another look at albums that may or may not deserve a second chance.
What happens when the second album completely overshadows the first? When the entire world knows a band through their follow-up, does the first even matter? Belle & Sebastian’s 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister followed the little-heard debut Tigermilk by less than six months, but has become such a keystone of chamber pop and bedsit melancholy that it seems a different order of beast altogether. I first heard the band years ago, when a friend in England played “We Rule the School” for me; I was unimpressed at the time and didn’t even remember the band until much later, when another international pal put a track from Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant on a mix for me. Again, nothing. But when I heard If You’re Feeling Sinister for the first time, it was as though a block was sliding into place. Suddenly, the songs that had seemed a bit too twee and the voice that was just a bit too arch had a key, a Rosetta Stone that made the rest of it sound right.
The strange thing is, there’s nothing that Sinister has that the other albums don’t. Further on in their career, Stuart Murdoch and pals (Isobel Campbell and Stevie Jackson foremost among them) developed their esoteric pop into wider and bolder directions, but the blueprint of Tigermilk is wholly the stuff from which Sinister is built. Perhaps the strongest difference between the two is the slight increase in orchestration and mixing, but that’s negligible; Murdoch has often lamented the quality of Sinister’s productions, signaling that if had Belle & Sebastian had the choice, it would have been an even grander affair, further from the kitchen sink guitars of their debut. More important is the quality of the songs themselves; tales of delicate perversity and suicidal teens were already the band’s stock in trade, but Sinister’s heroes and heroines are immortal in a way that made Tigermilk’s feel like mere impressions.
The opening lyrics are practically a statement of purpose: “Make a new cult every day/ To suit your affairs.” Murdoch’s deceptively gentle tones can fool a listener; the songs themselves can be so delicately pensive as to hide the playfulness, the fragments of youthful despair, and the subtle perversities. Tom Waits once said that he loved an awful voice saying beautiful things, and a beautiful voice stating the awful – worlds apart as the two might be, Belle & Sebastian fit the latter bill perfectly. The songs themselves veer from athletic emptiness (“Stars of Track and Field”) to senility and class differences (“Me and The Major”) to suicide and masturbation (the stunning title track, which also serves up the immortal lines “She was into S&M and Bible studies/ Not everyone’s cup of tea.”)
But what makes this album any different from the rest of the band’s catalog? Superficially, not much. The lyrical obsessions of faith, sex, and tea that are stamped in nearly every track on Sinister are just as prevalent on Tigermilk and the following albums. The relative obscurity of the debut can be partially blamed on a legendarily small release; only 1,000 copies were initially printed. But that’s misleading, as Sinister was originally issued on the indie-label Jeepster, hardly a massive world release itself. Instead, it’s the universality of something paradoxically of its time that makes the album so indelible – as in The Catcher in the Rye, the juvenile experience and all its negativity, brashness and yearning strikes with the stories and characters, not in spite of them. While Tigermilk drew a blueprint with tracks like “She’s Losing It” and its tale of schoolchildren Lisa and Chelsea, it’s Anthony and Hillary contemplating their own lack of charm and private bits that sticks in the mind.
Perhaps the album can be best summed up by “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”: “Play me a song to set me free/ Nobody writes them like they used to/ So it may as well be me.” The simultaneous audacity and melancholy is key; the lingering feeling of living out of one’s time and the desire for something more than the day to day is ultimately a youthful one. Sinister stands as the true birth of Belle & Sebastian not because it’s different from the rest of the work in its elements, but in atmosphere. Where Tigermilk is a statement for every lonely artistically minded person who’s ever sat in a bedsit with an acoustic guitar, If You’re Feeling Sinister is one for everyone who’s ever been young.
by Nathan Kamal
