Photo titled "Woman modeling the Guide-a-phone" by Alex J. Rota, 1956
From the first listen, I was needing The BBC Sessions to justify its existence to me. I've liked the wimpy-but-melodic baroque pop of Glasgow's Belle & Sebastian for a long time, but I've never reached the level of fandom (for any artist, really) where I need to buy a collection of slightly different versions of their best songs. And, at first, The BBC Sessions comes across as nothing more than that - listening to it this morning, I was ten minutes into it before I realized I wasn't just listening to If You're Feeling Sinister on shuffle. But then the flub in the woodwind part of "Judy and the Dream of Horses" made me go, "What? Oh, right." And it is actually at that moment when B&S start getting creative with their BBC versions. An unfamiliar but appealing distorted guitar comes into the arrangement of "Judy", and suddenly I realize that this collection might be worthwhile for its unique aspects.
The quasi-psych freakout at the end of "Sleep the Clock Around" is fun, and a more energetic "Slow Graffiti" adds some spark to a song that I always found a little limp. And then there's the four songs of the final session, which were never released anywhere else. Isobel Campbell's final recording with the band, these songs feature her prominently, and all four songs are keepers. But, for me, the real draw here is that two very flawed song are substantially improved in their versions here. I've always had issues with the bombastic vocal by Monica Queen on "Lazy Line Painter Jane" - it never seemed a good match for the band's style (like Cyndi Lauper shouting over a Simon & Garfunkel song), and the version on The BBC Sessions features guitarist Stevie Jackson taking the Queen vocal. I'm not a huge fan of Stevie Jackson's singing either (I don't know why this collection features two of his least inspired compositions, "Seymour Stein" and "The Wrong Girl"), but he is a welcome change from the original in this case.
The other song that benefits from a change of necessity is "The Stars of Track and Field" from Feeling Sinister. It's the opening track on that album and its original arrangement features an agonizingly long and slow fade-in that has always bothered me. If you're listening to the album in the car, for instance, you don't hear ANYTHING for the first minute of it's playing unless you crank the volume all the way up. The version here is superior and shows that the epic build of the arrangement doesn't suffer at all from starting at an audible level. For me, The BBC Sessions is a worthwhile listen, if only because it introduced me to a favorite that I never knew I loved because I had trouble hearing it.
"The Stars of Track and Field" by Belle & Sebastian
0 comments:
Post a Comment