by Peter Gorman

What can one say about a rock group that named itself after a French children's television show?

That it is melodic. And often brilliant. That they love Underground and the Smiths. And the Beatles. And frolicking under blue skies while the bluebirds of happiness are whistling up above because everyone's falling in love, unless the rain comes and ruins everything, then they will pout about the house and complain to anyone who will listen that they are so misunderstood. (Slam the bedroom door, don't come out for hours.) Don't worry, though; in the end bandleader Stuart Murdoch will step in and save the day, fey genius that he be.

The Belle and Sebastian bio reads like fiction, which some of it well may be. Glasgow resident Stuart Murdoch works as a live-in janitor at a church and sings in the choir, present tense because he allegedly still does this. It is also rumored that he once was a pugilist, which might explain where he gets the nerve to rough up his sweet pop songs. As the story goes, one day in January of 1996 Murdoch set out to form a band, and sat down in a diner to hold auditions. He found five or six musicians from both genders, and Belle and Sebastian became a group, though absent any credits in the liner notes for its various members (from the liner notes to their second album: "Sarah Martin is our new member for this record. See if you can guess which bits she did."). In 1996 they recorded their first album, Tigermilk, but only released 1,000 copies (it has been subsequently re-released by Matador in the U.S. and Jeepster in the U.K.). The album cover depicts an androgynous-looking woman breast feeding a stuffed animal, which actually sums up the band's music as well as anything could.

Belle and Sebastian set the tone with their very first song, "The State I Am In," as good a song as Murdoch will ever write, about a man whose brother announces his homosexuality on their sister's wedding day, while the man goes on to marry a child bride so that she can avoid being deported, then introduces her to alcohol before running off to confess to a priest who writes a novel about the man's sins. At the end he thinks he's found religion but ends up riding buses and feeling guilty instead. All this in less than five minutes, and set to a beautiful melody with a spare arrangement that the band uses to quietly raise the drama as the song moves along (a weaker version of the song is included on the band's first EP, Dog On Wheels).

The band went on to record a second album in late 1996 (released in the U.S. in 1997), If You're Feeling Sinister, a masterpiece that Pavement leader Stephen Malkmus called one of the three best albums of the '90s. Murdoch wrote and sung every song on If You're Feeling Sinister, and never does he fail to write a gem, though on occasion the lyrics lapse into sentimental territory and the music does the same. ("Belle and Sebastian can be great and terrible within the very same song." - Tim Frommer, rock critic.) That's the danger for a pop band; if the song doesn't succeed, there are no blues progressions to fall back on, no pounding beat to hide a monotonous melody or insipid lyric. Belle and Sebastian take many risks, both musically and lyrically, that other navel-gazing, sweet-sounding pop bands avoid, and If You're Feeling Sinister succeeds so often that it is good as pop music got in the 1990s.

In 1998, Belle and Sebastian released another excellent album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, though the result was less Murdoch and more democracy, and his mates lacked his ability to put a precious song into relief with a lyric that shattered all the ickiness surrounding it. And yet there are many ways that a band is preferable to a solo act, even when one member of the band is far and away its guiding light. Murdoch sacrificed significant authority when he decided not to call his band Stuart the Perky Puppeteer and His Twee Little Pals, and perhaps the music has turned out better that way. Maybe just by naming the band the Kinks, Ray Davies was guaranteed to make better music than calling it the Ray Davies Band with the same personnel, but there are limits to democracy, mainly that everyone gets a vote, which a lot of the time means that eventually even the tuneless drummer gets a song quota (though I have no idea who the Belle and Sebastian drummer is since their records don't give out such data, so if he/she is penning some of these gems, forgive me, but show yourself please).

It's not that there aren't multiple capable songwriters in Belle and Sebastian. Listen to "Waiting for the Moon to Rise" or "The Family Tree" on their latest album and you will hear exquisite pop songs with ethereal female vocals - wonderful, and yet it wants that extra kick, that edge that puts it into the pop song pantheon, which is where Murdoch comes in. His own vocals recall either Donovan or Nick Drake, depending whether he's singing an upbeat song or a moody one. He seems to move back and forth between Donovan'ssunshine and Nick Drake's pink moons, but he outshines them both, and competes on a level with the best of Ray Davies, a pop songwriting achievement of the tallest order.

Actually I don't consider vocal comparisons to Donovan and Drake to be a compliment; decent singers, but a little bland. The same can be said of Murdoch. He's up there with Ray Davies as a songwriter, but not as a singer, at least not the Davies who back in the late '60s seemed to actually be the person in "Sunny Afternoon" and "Waterloo Sunset" as he sang the words (then again, maybe he was). Murdoch can't do this. Instead he inserts a line that captures the essence of what he's singing about or is just so perfect that the listener takes notice without ever glancing at the lyric sheet. There's a Murdoch song called "You Made Me Forget My Dreams" which at first seems as awkward and predictable as the title suggests, but then Murdoch sings in the last stanza, "When I woke up to you sleeping/There was blood on the sheets again." So what if in earlier stanzas he was dreaming that he was building a space rocket, and his lover made him forget this moment of soporific joy? The blood on the sheets is the dominating image, the one that makes the space rocket image not only forgivable but welcome, and a slide guitar keeps Murdoch's delicate melody from floating away. In a song about a woman going blind is the line, "She thought it would be fun to try pornography." Or from the song "Male Model" come the lines "She met a blind kid at a fancy dress/It was the best sex she ever had" and "The girl next door who's famous for showing her breasts." In "Photo Jenny" Murdoch sings that he doesn't do drugs, all he really wants is acan, uh, think about her. Or from the title track to If You're Feeling Sinister, "She was into S&M and bible studies/Not everyone's cup of tea she would admit to me." Much of the time Murdoch likes to sing about sex with a bit of religion thrown in, which sounds about right for a choir boy, God bless him. He seems to know what he's doing.

Democracy is particularly welcome when the band knows how to play it's instruments (and when not to play them). Whether there are seven or eight members in the band, it generally sounds like there are only three or four who decided to show up at the studio that day, but fortunately less really does turn out to be more, and the band can play, though it took a guest vocalist for me to notice it. On "Lazy Line Painter Jane" from the EP of the same name, the band brings in Monica Queen (only the guests get referenced in the liner notes, apparently), who belts out a song about a woman/girl who has casual sex with both genders and regrets her reputation, though she still hopes that another female will catch her in the act, I'm not sure who, possibly her mother. Funny how it takes a great vocal to notice the band.

Belle and Sebastian have always sounded committed to the songs, but if their first album showed that at times one can be too innocent, then their latest - Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant - demonstrates that sometimes one can also try too hard. "Beyond the Sunrise" is so bad that it sounds like a joke, a Leonard Cohen parody, and its pretentious lyrics are matched by a musical arrangement that sounds painstakingly conceived, and now it's the listener's turn to suffer. Oh well, the risks of pop music, every song an adventure, no time-honored riffs in a safety net down below. Most of Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant shows Belle and Sebastian still in their prime, only straining more often for significance.

The album kicks off with "I Fought in a War," a majestic, engaging song about what it says, which comes across as a less majestic and engaging experience than being a star of track and field, or perhaps it is simply less convincing. The band's move from innocence to experience is inevitable, though fraught with peril for those enamored of spring days and holding hands and chasing the big floppy bunny around the meadow. No doubt some of the new songs were recorded with the best of intentions. "The Chalet Lines" is a ballad about rape sung by the female victim, though Murdoch takes the vocals, a fortunate choice; the song would be unbearable if it was a woman's voice singing lines like, "He raped me in the chalet lines/I had just said no for the final time." Murdoch's sullen male vocal puts just enough distance between the listener and the horror of the experience, and Murdoch once again puts everything into relief by putting in a few lines of rage among the pity: "I missed my time, I don't think I could stand/To take the test, I'm feeling sick/Fuck this, I've felt like this for a week/I'd put a knife right into his eyes." Honorable, well done, and followed by "Nice Day for a Sulk," a title that could have come straight out of the Morrissey song book, and a welcome return to insignificance, celebrating youth and name checking the Fall.

Most of Fold Your Hands style that Belle and Sebastian has cultivated from the start, and they still pull it off so well and so often that all else is forgiven; bless those soaring melodies and occasionally cutting lyrics, the band's empathetic support of the singer and the song, bless all seven or eight of them wee folk, whoever they are. Given Stuart Murdoch's intelligence and prodigious songwriting talents, one might expect the band to put out great music for years to come, but the ephemeral greatness of past pop bands offers little hope. After four albums and four EPs in a mere four years, Sebastian are making the most of their short time at the top of the hill, happily strumming and singing the days away in the tree house that Stu built. May they stay forever young at least a little while longer.