Customer Reviews
A classic and by far their best - By: Mr. J. P. Shields, 06 Apr 2008 
Full of poignant, hummable tunes. They have never bettered this.
If you like catchy music buy it.
I am listening to Sleep the Clock Around now. Absolutely glorious. Especially when the synth solo bit kicks in, & then just when you think it can't get any better - bagpipes.
The current crop of British indie bands would sell body parts to write stuff like this. Belle & Sebastian would probably sell body parts to write more stuff like this.
A true classic.
Dappled Sunlight - By: jol legend, 31 Aug 2007 
Offering a gentle alternative to the rampant Oasis & Blur dominated lad culture of mid-90s Britpop, B&S's rather lovely The Boy with the Arab Strap contains a dozen catchy pop songs of nostalgia, adolescence, inadequacy, innocence, longing, desire, endless childhood summers, & odes to the joys of generally lazing around, sung with fragile voices mostly to a low-fi backing of acoustic guitar, piano & soft snare one-twos.
But this is no ordinary disposable pop; It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career starts the album with the line "He had a stroke at the age of 24", & we realise these are not songs you're likely to be singing around the campfire despite the accessibility of the simple nursery rhyme like melodies. The wistful & sometimes surreal lyrics will appeal to fans of Morrissey or Nick Drake, & conjure up romantic images of colourfully dressed bohemians reading French poetry outside coffee houses on a sunny day.
Best of all is the infectious hand clapping title tune where singer Stuart Murdoch mischievously changes the lyrics to "You were laid on your back, with the Boy FROM the Arab Strap", a nod to fellow Scotch indie-band named after said item of bedroom-wear!
8/10. 'Ease Your Feet In The Sea' - By: Demob Happy, 16 Jul 2007 On first inspection the Amazon's favourable comparison to the Smiths & the Velvet Underground seems a little generous. And while the lyrical concerns bear resemblance to those of Morrissey & Stuart Murdoch's vocals make for a less smokey Nick Drake, Belle & Sebastian don't quite reach that songwriting bracket. Nevertheless, the Boy with the Arab Strap is a real grower, & after a few listens its melodic hooks start to catch. They excel at making music so seemingly light & effortless gradually leave its indelible mark on the heart & mind. Bleak stories of everyday failure & regret add a bitter taste to the unflinching prettiness of the music. Stuart Murdoch & Isobel Campbell aren't quite the odd couple of Lou Reed & Nico (or even Morrissey / Marr) but they make revisionist pop as dreamily saccharin as the Velvets.
'It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career' marries the Velvets' prototype dream-pop with Nick Drake's jazzier sensibilities, the folksy acoustic guitar slowly embellished with piano & alt-country tinges. 'Sleep the Clock Around' builds sweetly shimmering electronics & piano around a delicate melodic refrain. Swelling into a blissful synth & trumpet driven finale, this is where my Belle & Sebastian preconceptions went out of the window. 'Is It Wicked Not To Care' features Isobel Campbell on vocals & summery, breezy orchestrations. Despite the relative lushness of the musicianship on songs like this, it always feels loose & spontaneous, never top-heavy or over-produced. 'Seymour Stein' is like the Velvets' 'Pale Blue Eyes', with some lovely summery organs, piano & horns. 'Space Boy Dream' begins with a cryptic spoken-word sample & turns into a jazzy instrumental David Axelrod would be proud of. 'Dirty Dream Number Two' has a propulsive stomp & nice upbeat horn arrangements, reminiscent of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter.
While the invariability of the mood & the lack of vocal range can make the it a little samey, it is a gorgeous & uplifting record all the same. I was expecting something much more fey & brooding than this but it is really quite a revelation. If you like this you might like Feist's 'The Reminder' or Lambchop's 'Nixon' as well.
Musical Poetry - By: Mike Cormack, 02 Jan 2007 Some albums change your life; "Nevermind The Bollocks", "Appetite For Destruction" & "Maxinequaye" are some of those that have touched me deeply & made me a different person. "The Boy With The Arab Strap" did it for me,in a quite remarkable & totally unique way. I'd actually bought it by mistake (like I imagine quite a lot of people did, meaning to buy an album by Arab Strap), but listened to it & was impressed by the lush literacy of the lyrics, & of the delicate orchestration & musicianship. Although my favourite band was the Beatles, I'd generally considered myself a rocker (from punk through to prog), so this was a major turnaround, but that's what a great band can do you to.
It'd seemed like B&S had come out of nowhere, but this was by now their third album, & the one where they reached critical mass, bothin terms of popularity (incredibly winning the "Best Newcomer"in the 1997 Brits) &in quality (this is a far richer album musically than "If You're Feeling Sinister", & probably their best).
Their territory is poetic short-stories, about losers coming good, or about people out of their depth, with beautifully-written, waspish vingnettes. Although the vocals sound very delicate, the lyrics can sting. The contrast between soaring, uplifting music & biting words can be highly effective, & undercuts the emptional effect.
The first song, "It Could Have Been A Brillian Career" sets the tone. It opens, the sound down very low, with fey vocals, with guitar & electric piano joining in. A song about losers of various types ("He had a stroke at the age of 24 / It could have been a brilliant career"), it's enriched by fanastic harmonies & further instrumentation, ending musically upbeat even as it laments another life ending sadly ("And you can tell by the way she looks / he is sorry & resigned / As he wets himself for the final time").
This is quickly followed by one of their greatest moments, "Sleep The Clock Around", a song about losers & nobodies who could, just maybe could, be somebodies. Opening slowly, the vocals low & murmuring, it gradually buildsin colour, charge, potency & musical richness, to a bridge, saying "Then you go to the place where you've finally found /
You can look at yourself sleep the clock around". It ends of an incedible feeling of hope, defiance, yearning, wishing & desire, articulated (and what's incredible is that it's not embarrassing) by a bagpipe's wail. Incredible, a song of the most highest order, articulate to the highest degree, worthy of The Beatles or the Velvet Underground.
Asides from the songs by Stuart Murdoch (most of them) & Steve Jackson (the rest), there are a few sung by Isobel Campbell, as is the third song, "Is IT Wicked Not To Care?". It's gorgeously delicate, shimmering like the lightest cobwebsin a winter sun.
Other highlighs of the album include "Dirty Dream #2", where the waspish lyrics are again undercut by the remarkable music, which ends on an extended coda, the soaring strings shimmeringin beautiful tremelo, evoking delight & purest joy. Incredible. Then there's a few wonderful little vignettes, such as "Seymour Stein", a no-thank-you to the record exec, with lines as brilliantly parochial as "Has he ever seen Dundee?" Then there's a failure-with-women ode, "Chickfactor", with rejection written off as well as "Met the cigarette girl- took a note of her charms / But no cigar" & "Met the Indie-Cool Queen / Took me out of the bar & showed me the scene".
Belle & Sebastian have some of the greatest gifts of any band I've ever heard - finer lyricists than Morrissey, greater musically than Nick Drake, as poetic as Larkin (both transform the everday into something numinous), as acute an eye as Roger Waters, as imaginative as John Lennon. This is to me the finest album of the 1990s & will echo down the generations, a shimmering, exhalted gift to the poets & dreamers.
This was given as a Christmas present. I love it. - By: Mr. Richard Douglas, 26 May 2006 This is a fantastic album. Some friends got it for me for Christmas & after listening to it a few times, totally fellin love with it. The lyrics are simply amazing. The first song "could have been a brilliant career" is great. Each track is fantastic. My favourite is "sleep the clock around" which has a great tune & brilliant lyrics. Mostly mellow-ish music with a quirky feel. Any fan of real music will find this album worth it.
