I woke up this morning with some stuff I wish I'd thought of yesterday and added into the column; here it is.
Belle & Sebastian make outsider music as much as any death metal band does. The outsider each tries to reach is, of course, different; in Belle & Sebastian's case, where men are always boys, women are always girls, and school is always on, their audience is composed of the people who make up the subjects of their songs. Girls who sculpt the Velvet Underground in clay for a high school project; Boys who are hapless and lazy and vaguely artistic and so forth. Indie kids, mostly. Of course, we should keep in mind the couplet I mentioned yesterday: Being a rebel's fine/But you go all the way to being brutal. While not as retiring as, say, the Field Mice, Belle & Sebastian also speak to the meek, the shy, the marginal, the can't-be-arsed.
The band has managed to reap a large audience beyond that, due to the pure beauty of the songs, but those are the people, as a rule, who think that the band speaks to them. Lately they've also begun poking fun at themselves and their audience ('Nice Day For A Sulk' being the prime example). Their audience is often annoying, sometimes even to them, and when the odd burst of action and determination bursts through the restrained loveliness of most of Belle & Sebastian's output, it is both wonderful simply for the contrast and also proves that they can do it when they choose. The wonderful 'La Pastie De La Bourgeosie', from the same series of EPs as 'Lazy Line Painter Jane', is perhaps the most thrilling example of this, but 'Lazy Line Painter Jane' definitely belongs to the same part of Belle & Sebastian's oeuvre. There is a determination here; Jane may be sleeping in bus stops, but she has a resolve often lacking from Belle & Sebastian's songs. She will have a boy tonight, maybe she will have a boy tonight, and she hopes the world will see. But in any case, she's thinking about her name, and not how to live with it, but what she's going to do about it.
