Belle & Sebastian quietly built a dedicated following after the release of their second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, as word of mouth spread from indie kids to record collectors to store clerks to critics. By the end of 1997, the Scottish septet had developed a following every bit as passionate as the Smiths did at their peak. From the Motown stomp of "Dirty Dream Number Two" to the Paul Simon shuffle of the title track, there is more musical texture on Boy than Sinister. Such small, precious gems are what Belle & Sebastian are all about, and The Boy With the Arab Strap offers another round of timeless, endlessly fascinating folk-pop treasures.
Tigermilk is simply gorgeous, an unaffected debut equal to the Smiths' finest work, and seemed to arrive fully formed out of nowhere in May 1996. In songs like the pastoral, shimmering "The State I Am In" to the wonderfully naïve "We Rule the School", bandleader Stuart Murdoch had already laid the seeds that would later come to such full, poignant fruition on later albums. The 10 songs here have such a natural pop sensibility, such a grace and resonance, it's hard to believe that Tigermilk was only originally intended as a small-time project between seven Glaswegian friends (the original vinyl release was limited to 1,000 copies).
All the twee kids have a new hero--Belle & Sebastian front man Stuart Murdoch has replaced Morrissey in their pantheon of kindred spirits. But Murdoch is less Morrissey than Salinger, eschewing the former's moody, self-centered moroseness for the latter's wide-eyed, nostalgic innocence. And while it's easy to get lost in his witty literary narratives and precious brogue, you have to remember that Belle & Sebastian are a sum of their parts, each member contributing to Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, letting Murdoch shy away from the limelight. That varied palette gives Fold Your Hands Child a wide-ranging expression and subtlety not found on earlier albums.
Nov. 18 street date. Over the years, Belle And Sebastian have performed numerous sessions for the BBC, and now have
compiled some their most glowing treasures recorded between 1996-2001 for inclusion on this very special package. The single Radio Sessions CD is comprised of a complete Mark Radcliffe program appearance from July 1996, an abbreviated take of the Tigermilk track "I Could Be Dreaming" performed at a December ‘96 Radcliffe session, and five tunes from a July 1997 Steve Lamacq Radio 1 Evening Session show. In addition, the Sessions disc includes four totally unreleased songs from their classic Jeepster (UK) period: Shoot The Sexual Athlete, The Magic Of A Kind Word, Nothing In The Silence, and (My Girl’s Got) Miraculous Technique. * The band rarely performed live in the beginning and all 14 songs are noticebly different from the studio
versions and are some of the last recordings with former member, Isobel Campbell.
Nov. 18 street date. The deluxe 2 CD set contains the above sessions as well as an entire live show that was recorded in
Belfast and broadcast on BBC Evening Session in mid-2001. This disc includes another four previously unreleased songs, including covers of Here Comes The Sun, I’m Waiting For The Man, and The Boys Are Back In Town.
October 12 street date. After a 5-year hiatus that saw the release of solo projects, soundtracks and more, Glasgow’s beloved
Belle And Sebastian have returned with one of their finest albums yet, "Write About Love". Marrying the intimacy of early works like "Sinister" and "Tigermilk", with the production values of their more recent work, "Write About Love" is a varied, captivating and occasionally disturbing trawl through the mind of Stuart Murdoch and his band mates. The album features duets with Norah Jones and actress Carey Mulligan (An Education) and, like their last album, was recorded with full orchestration with producer Tony Hoffer at the Sound Factory in Los Angeles. Available on US import CD and LP, the booklet comes with essays about the recording of the album by Stuart, and the gatefold vinyl includes an MP3 download coupon of the entire record plus two bonus tracks. Special coupon inside 1st pressing of LP/CD to enter lyrics contest for love song "Write About Love", winning lyrics will be set to music by band and released on Valentine’s Day.
August 27 street date. See LP description for full details. The CD is available in deluxe hardbound book packing, recalling the classic "Push Barman To Open Old Wounds" collection.
August 27 street date. Belle & Sebastian are set to release ‘The Third Eye Centre’ - a collection of rarities, collectibles and non-LP tracks from the last decade through Matador. The tracks are taken from the Glaswegian band’s most recent three albums - ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ (2003), ‘The Life Pursuit’ (2006) and ‘Write About Love’ (2010). The album can be seen as the follow-up to ‘Push Barman To Open Old Wounds’ (2005) - a compilation of the Belle & Sebastian singles and EPs released on Jeepster Records. The album includes one brand new track ‘Your Cover’s Blown (Miaoux Miaoux Remix)’. 2003’s "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" ushered in a new chapter for Belle and Sebastian. Once a hushed bedroom indie project, the band reemerged as a pop powerhouse. Subsequent albums, "The Life Pursuit" and "Write About Love" marked a newfound confidence in the Scottish collective, and with it, some of their best records and stroNgest ticket sales to date, elevating Belle & Sebastian from cherished undergroundlings into masters of modern songcraft. "The Third Eye Centre", like its predecessor "Push Barman", collects fan favorite b-sides from cherished albums and also serves as a documentary of a decade - in this case, Belle And Sebastian’s second coming. This collection traces the band’s growing interest in and mastery of classic rock, glam, disco and pop, all anchored by Stuart Murdoch’s forever-intimate lyricism. The Third Eye Centre’s collection of b-sides, collectibles & non-LP tracks is an indispensable entry into any Belle and Sebastian fan’s stacks and an essential preview of what the future holds.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
October 7 street date. All The B & S Classics Reissued on Vinyl ! All ten albums repackaged in resealable mylar bags, each with customized obi 'It Could have been a brilliant career' + all album art. Download coupons included plus brand new cover art for ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’. "Push Barman...," "The Life Pursuit," and "Dear Catatrophe Waitress" back in print after a long absence from the market.
January 20 street date. "Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance" is Belle & Sebastian’s long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s "Write About Love". Produced and mixed at Maze Studios in Atlanta by Ben H. Allen III, best known for his work with Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective, and Raury, among others, the band - who have been listening to things like vintage Detroit techno and Giorgio Moroder - have brought a dance-party element into their gorgeous tales of sensitive souls navigating a world gone awry. It is perhaps the most inspired and wide-reaching album Belle and Sebastian have ever made. "Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance" is also their most sonically diverse album: there's the klezmer chorus on stand-out track ‘The Everlasting Muse’, radio anthem ‘The Party Line’ with its Chic guitar and filtered-house intro, and the squelchy synth break on ‘The Book Of You’. It ends with the bleached-out, solarized beauty of ‘Today (This Army's For Peace)’, with a woozy 1968 feel, somewhere between the Monkees' ‘As We Go Along’ and Robert Wyatt: "Come out into the light, today." The album is available in 3 import configurations: CD (with 16 page booklet), double gatefold vinyl, and limited edition quadruple LP set in lidded box with poster. Featured are two extended mixes and three bonus tracks, two of which are exclusive to this format.
January 20 street date. "Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance" is Belle & Sebastian’s long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s "Write About Love". Produced and mixed at Maze Studios in Atlanta by Ben H. Allen III, best known for his work with Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective, and Raury, among others, the band - who have been listening to things like vintage Detroit techno and Giorgio Moroder - have brought a dance-party element into their gorgeous tales of sensitive souls navigating a world gone awry. It is perhaps the most inspired and wide-reaching album Belle and Sebastian have ever made. "Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance" is also their most sonically diverse album: there's the klezmer chorus on stand-out track ‘The Everlasting Muse’, radio anthem ‘The Party Line’ with its Chic guitar and filtered-house intro, and the squelchy synth break on ‘The Book Of You’. It ends with the bleached-out, solarized beauty of ‘Today (This Army's For Peace)’, with a woozy 1968 feel, somewhere between the Monkees' ‘As We Go Along’ and Robert Wyatt: "Come out into the light, today".
January 20 street date. "Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance" is Belle & Sebastian’s long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s "Write About Love". Produced and mixed at Maze Studios in Atlanta by Ben H. Allen III, best known for his work with Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective, and Raury, among others, the band - who have been listening to things like vintage Detroit techno and Giorgio Moroder - have brought a dance-party element into their gorgeous tales of sensitive souls navigating a world gone awry. It is perhaps the most inspired and wide-reaching album Belle and Sebastian have ever made. "Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance" is also their most sonically diverse album: there's the klezmer chorus on stand-out track ‘The Everlasting Muse’, radio anthem ‘The Party Line’ with its Chic guitar and filtered-house intro, and the squelchy synth break on ‘The Book Of You’. It ends with the bleached-out, solarized beauty of ‘Today (This Army's For Peace)’, with a woozy 1968 feel, somewhere between the Monkees' ‘As We Go Along’ and Robert Wyatt: "Come out into the light, today." The album is available in 3 import configurations: CD (with 16 page booklet), double gatefold vinyl, and limited edition quadruple LP set in lidded box with poster. Featured are two extended mixes and three bonus tracks, two of which are exclusive to this format.
December 8 street date. Harkening back to their 1997 release of three consecutive EPs ('Dog On Wheels', 'Lazy Line Painter Jane', and '3.. 6.. 9 Seconds Of Light'), Belle and Sebastian are releasing three new EPs under the umbrella title 'How To Solve Our Human Problems', with the first EP coming out on December 8th, the second on January 19th, and the third on February 16th. The EP trilogy will culminate with a compilation CD and a limited vinyl box set containing all three EPs, with the option of a box just for EP3 for those who have already purchased 1 and 2. Premiere single, "We Were Beautiful" appears on How to Solve Our Human Problems Part 1, while a freshly unveiled track called "I'll Be Your Pilot" is taken from the second instalment. 'How To Solve Our Human Problems' is, if you like, Belle and Sebastian Redux. When Belle and Sebastian felt new music percolating, they decided to break from the working methods of the recent years and instead stay at home, record the tracks as and when, often producing themselves, working with friends and collaborators to see what emerged. Working in Glasgow gave them the freedom to work without the constraints that making an album can impose: they could take their time honing and experimenting.
February 23 street date. A new Belle and Sebastian release is always something to cheer. So three new releases leads to the inevitable conclusion: three cheers! Here is the latest installment in a career that has always pursued a singular and delightful vision of what pop represents and what it can achieve, a career that has seen them triumph against the odds to win a Brit award, be one of the first bands to curate their own festival, and play at the official London residence of the US ambassador (the last president’s ambassador, not the current one’s). There’s one big reason why 15 songs are coming out on three EPs, rather than one album. “We’d made a couple of LPs, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, within the space of six months,” Murdoch says, remembering the early days of the band’s career, and how that fed into their decision-making this time. LIMITED EDITION BOXSET. INCLUDES POSTER WITH 80 PHOTOGRAPHS OF FANS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
February 23 street date. A new Belle and Sebastian release is always something to cheer. So three new releases leads to the inevitable conclusion: three cheers! Here is the latest installment in a career that has always pursued a singular and delightful vision of what pop represents and what it can achieve, a career that has seen them triumph against the odds to win a Brit award, be one of the first bands to curate their own festival, and play at the official London residence of the US ambassador (the last president’s ambassador, not the current one’s). There’s one big reason why 15 songs are coming out on three EPs, rather than one album. “We’d made a couple of LPs, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, within the space of six months,” Murdoch says, remembering the early days of the band’s career, and how that fed into their decision-making this time. Includes all the songs from the EP series. Same cover image as box set.
January 19 street date. A new Belle and Sebastian release is always something to cheer. So three new releases leads to the inevitable conclusion: three cheers! Here is the latest installment in a career that has always pursued a singular and delightful vision of what pop represents and what it can achieve, a career that has seen them triumph against the odds to win a Brit award, be one of the first bands to curate their own festival, and play at the official London residence of the US ambassador (the last president’s ambassador, not the current one’s). Stuart Murdoch, as ever, is not the only writer. Sarah Martin (violin/vocals) brought in the delicious ‘The Same Star’, which marries Belle and Sebastian’s melodiousness to a pounding Motown backbeat, and was produced by Leo Abrahams (Ghostpoet, Wild Beasts, Regina Spektor). “We’d met Leo in February of 2016, and I’d say that meeting and the recording of ‘I’ll Be Your Pilot’ were the first tangible steps of this EP project,” Martin says. “We didn’t have a stack of songs to play him, but we liked him and he became a part of the plan from that point - and when I’d got to a point with ‘The Same Star’ where it just needed to be recorded, I thought it could benefit from having a producer to steer things, and fortunately we had a slot in the diary marked ‘Leo’ coming up. It’s not a song we’d laboured over playing for months - it fell together quite quickly thanks in large part to Bob’s [Bobby Kildea, guitarist] enthusiasm and Stuart’s willingness to dismember an old song and repurpose the break, so that it wasn’t just the same three chords over and over and over.” There’s one big reason why 15 songs are coming out on three EPs, rather than one album. “We’d made a couple of LPs, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, within the space of six months,” Murdoch says, remembering the early days of the band’s career, and how that fed into their decision-making this time.
December 11 street date. "What To Look For In Summer" is a live double album gathering choice selections from Belle And Sebastian's 2019 world tour. Neither a retrospective nor a back-door greatest-hits, "What To Look For In Summer" is the sound of a band that's always moving forward, a picture of Belle and Sebastian in 2019 that gives equal weight to early days ("My Wandering Days Are Over", "Seeing Other People") and recent years.
December 11 street date. "What To Look For In Summer" is a live double album gathering choice selections from Belle And Sebastian's 2019 world tour. Neither a retrospective nor a back-door greatest-hits, "What To Look For In Summer" is the sound of a band that's always moving forward, a picture of Belle and Sebastian in 2019 that gives equal weight to early days ("My Wandering Days Are Over", "Seeing Other People") and recent years.
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