Belle & Sebastian

Seamus, you said that you were reluctant to post anything about Jenny Lewis’s new album because of the amount of press she’s been getting, but I hope we can use this site in the way we’ve used emails in the past: to recommend things to each other and to anyone else who might be reading. I bring this up because I bought Belle & Sebastian’s new album The Life Pursuit last week and wanted to recommend it, but I felt a little of what you were probably feeling. Is it a fear of being unoriginal? I don’t know, but I do know that this latest B&S album is awesome. I actually might have a crush on it.

I keep hearing that with The Life Pursuit the Glaswegian septet has produced some very different tracks, as if this album was their pursuit of a more commercial success. Maybe they have, and maybe I’m too dim to recognize it, but they still sound like the Belle & Sebastian I fell in love with back in the summer of ’97. This is still an album chock full of sensitive lads reflecting on girls and the local vicarage. What’s great about this album, though, is that it has so many appealing songs on it. The middle of the album moves from the staticky farting organ and boot-stomping beat of White Collar Boy and to the similarly T-Rex-channeling The Blues are Still Blue through the frenetic italian porn music of We Are the Sleepyheads to the bass-heavy cricket-chirping Song of Sunshine. I’ve yet to listen to the album less than twice in one sitting and I always end up with a different song stuck in my head.

Go buy it. It really is worth it. Don’t believe me?

• Download Another Sunny Day.

For fun, see if you can find the track that includes the organ line from 
the ? and the Mysterians hit 96 Tears.