Customer Reviews

Boy With The Arab Strap

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

When I sit at home on a lazy summer day (bored as usual) there's a certain album that I can just lie in bed and let it take me away into another world. This album is it. I was recently introduced to Belle and Sebastian through a friend, who was listening to their album Dear Catastrophe Waitress. I liked it quite a bit, and decided to explore the band further. The end result was that I found one of my favorite bands of all time. Each song on this album for me is pure bliss, through and through. Poppy yet complex, easy to listen to, and interesting lyrics, all combine together to form a band that is certain not to dissapoint.

Highly recommended

Eight-person band Belle & Sebastian prove that pop is not confined to the brainless bubblegum genre. The melancholy melodies of "Boy With the Arab Strap" show Belle & Sebastian at their peak, with their gently complex music and quietly restrained pop songs.

"Arab Strap" starts off with "It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career," an elusive, quirky little tune that builds up from near silence. Following it up is the almost-catchy, percussive "Sleep the Clock Around," the darkly beautiful title track, the wistful "Summer Wasting," the lulling "Seymour Stein" with its magnificently shivery organ, and finally it finishes up with the pretty, downbeat "Rollercoaster Ride."

Nobody makes the sad stuff any prettier than Belle & Sebastian. "Boy With the Arab Strap" is not quite perfect -- "Seymour Stein," despite its lyrical brilliance, has a forgettable little tune, and the lyrics vary wildly. But their work here is certainly enjoyable and beautiful, balancing out the sweetness, the humor, the melancholy, and the coffee-shop-poet dissatisfaction with life.

The songs brim over with vague unhappiness, an ethereal sense of how the world is full of misery. It's best shown in "Boy With the Arab Strap": Stuart Murdoch sings with deceptive perkiness, "Do you ever feel you have gone too far?/Everyone suffers in silence a burden..." Murdoch let the others do several of the songs for this album, which gives a vague, weird feeling of creative unevenness.

Stuart Murdoch does most of the vocals, and his murmuring voice seems perfectly suited to the songs. And the piano and shimmering violin are backed up by the keyboard, organs, jazzy percussion, delicate chimes and little sonic flourishes like a jet going overhead. One highlight is the delicious bagpipe solo in "Sleep the Clock Around," which completely dominates the music.

The dismally lovely music of Belle & Sebastian is in good, though not perfect form on "Boy With the Arab Strap." Best advised for those who dream of dark coffee-houses, and poetry that drips with loneliness.

Ok...So if you own beautiful precursor to this album 'If you're feeling sinister' you probably bought it at the start of winter and spent the next two months reading and humming along while riding on city buses for a hobby (to borrow a few words from our darling Stuart). Well, all you nerdy woolen-jumper-wearers, here is your album for spring, and possibly for summer too. 'Boy with the arab strap' lacks the lovely British-ness of '...sinister', but more than makes up for it with imaginative, pretty tunes and consistently brilliant lyrics. Of course it's all nice, but there's plenty that's, well, wonderful!!!!! 'Seymour Stein' is a glorious, mini-epic (I particularly love the line about the 'north country girl'!!!) and the title track is irresistable. I could gush all day, but instead will choose to highlight the thorn amongst a dozen roses which is 'A space boy dream'. Electronic music does not gel well with B&S's lovely lyricism (does anyone actually listen to 'Electronic renaissance' on 'Tigermilk') and disturbs the beautiful balance of the rest of the album. This minor quibble aside, this is a gorgeous album, and a must for all daydreamers, scrabble-players and bookworms.

I have not been this happy with an album purchase in a long time. I first heard the song "Boy With the Arab Strap" about a month ago. I was at work, and one of the maintenance guys was playing it on a boom box in the basement. I was struck by its beauty, but I dallied in buying the album.

Now that I have it, I wish I'd bought it sooner. Literally every song is memorable. Two are absolutely haunting: "Boy With the Arab Strap" and "Sleep the Clock Around." And here's something else -- it gets better with each listen.

I can really relate to the reviewer who wrote that he would always remember this album as his "summer" album. It actually feels like something from my past, like a children's song -- especially "Rollercoaster Ride." (The first line is straight out of Sesame Street: "Hey people looking out the window at the city below...")

This album is so sweet it makes me want to cry.

This is a superior album. Isobel's singing on "Is It Wicked To Care?" is really good, very simplistic and meaningful ("rusting armor for effect..."). By far, the best song on the album is "Ease Your Feet Into The Sea." I listen to an extremely varied mix of music and find this one song to be one of the very best I've heard in the last 10 years or so. The arrangement is tight and there isn't a lot of extraneous music clouding the sound of the acoustic guitar. I love the sound of the fingers moving across the strings during the song's solo, too.
CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THEM AT THE WARFIELD ON 4/30!!!!

The Boy with the Arab Strap was my first foray into Belle & Sebastian. A combination of retro 60's sounding melodies, chord progressions, and sunshine and bubble-gum lyrics with a dash of angst brings together a modern day version of Peter, Paul, and Mary. The first play in my CD player, I wondered what I had wasted my money on. The second play, I started picking out a few songs I really liked, and by listening to them a few more times the album grew on me.

Like Rush's Geddy Lee, Stuart Murdoch's vocals take a few listens to get used to, and like Lee and Rush, many people will never give B&S a chance in spite of Murdoch's voice. It's a shame, since they're missing out on a great band that doesn't get enough credit.

The Boy with the Arab Strap is good, but not perfect. There are a few songs that are very forgettable and lyrically convoluted. Seymour Stein has a catchy hook, but feels like every other pop ballad released in the 60's and 70's. In A Space Boy Dream, Murdoch literally speaks a story, with a fast-paced postlude of jazzy music at the end that really has no listener value to non die-hard fans.

That being said, there are indeed some incredible tunes on this CD. It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career, A Summer Wasting, and Simple Things stand out quite well. But the highlight of the album is Dirty Dream Number Two. Think of The Doors Touch Me combined with Tom Jones' It's Not Unusual and you have Dirty Dream Number Two. It's an example of Belle & Sebastian at their finest.

The Boy with the Arab Strap has found a place on the small pile of CD's atop my CD player, ready to be inserted at any time. When I need a quick pick-me-up or a stress-reliever, it's the first album I play, though never from cover to cover.

Belle & Sebastian's follow-up to 'If You're Feeling Sinister' is a bit of a letdown. Although every song is beautifully recorded, they are surprisingly dull. The CD comes across like a collection of B-sides. Unlike 'If You're Feeling Sinister,' in which every song sticks in your head after one listen, it takes quite a while to become familiar with these. The only really good song is the title track. That one is just about perfect.

"The Boy with the Arab Strap" for me shows a band unsure where to go. After the success of the low budget "If you're feeling sinister" album the band finally have the money to record an orchestral masterpiece that showcases the range they are capable of. Instead Stuart Murdoch bottles it. He lets his friends write and sing their own songs and the result is a somewhat incoherent and largely self-indulgent album. The lack of direction is best illustrated by looking at the center of the album. The magnificent "Summer Wasting" is followed up by "Seymour Stein", an attack at the famous record exec that comes across as childish and petulant, and "Space boy dream", where Stuart David showcases his poetry skills for the last time before leaving to concentrate on his "Looper" side project. "Dirty dream number two" also has a certain filler feel to it, leaving the title track, which is possibly the best track on the album, horrifically unsupported and practically carrying the rest of the album. Perhaps it was writers block, or perhaps the others nagged him for more record space, but compare "Chickfactor" to "The Boy with the Arab Strap" and then tell me this is Belle and Sebastian at their best...
"It's good - but it's not right".

P.S. The titular Arab Strap is a marital aid that constrictively enhances staying power. I don't believe it's available through amazon.com...

I love If You're Feeling Sinister more than words can explain, but I think The Boy With The Arab Strap might have it beat, in my book anyway. Yes, Stuar Murdoch lets some of the other B&S folks handle a few of the tracks, and yes, Stuart is unquestionably the strongest songwriter. But in all fairness, the tunes from Isobel Campbell and Steve Jackson offer a nice little bit of variety, and Jackson offers one of the album's best tunes, a clever song about lost love entitled "Seymour Stein" (this is the track used in the film High Fidelity). Elsewhere, Stuart Murdoch offers more of his fantastically twisted, sardonic, and beautiful tunes, such as the lush opener "It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career," "Ease Your Feet In The Sea," the addictive and upbeat title track, and the subdued epic of a closer, "The Rollercoaster Ride." "A Spaceboy Dream" is arguably a throwaway, but it really doesn't bog down the album in any way; the sequencing seems just right, as to not clutter the non-Murdoch compositions together. The Boy With The Arab Strap is another B&S album that seems to come from another time or an alternate universe, one where light, airy 60's folk-pop is based on intelligent, dark, and clever wordplay. Say what you want about this not following through on Belle & Sebastian's promise. It's my personal fav.

I can't count how many times I have listened to "If you're feeling sinister". If you are a Belle and Sebastian fan, you know that most of their songs are written and sung by Stuart Murdoch. Arab Strap is a compilation of songs from all the band members, and in my opinion, it takes away from their sound. While the other bandmembers are all fantastic, they are part of a band, and Murdoch is the songwriter. A failed experimentation, but definetly worth buying.