POLLercoaster Ride - ILM Artist Poll #94 - Belle and Sebastian - Discussion/Campaigning Thread

Great thread title!

Having a They Might Be Giants poll followed by a Belle and Sebastian poll is basically This Is Your Life for me.

I'm one of those who's kind of fallen off the bus in recent years, off to relisten to the newer records I know less well...

here for this

I am kinda shocked at the enthusiasm here tbh. Things done changed on ILM. I mean, there's some serious vitriol on older threads from Ned, Doc C, Dan Perry, many other longtime posters:

Search And Destroy: Belle And Sebastian
Belle and Sebastian: CorD??
fuck belle & sebastian?
when, exactly, did belle & sebastian start sucking?

anyway I always thought they were great up through Fold Your Hands, which is abysmal, and I haven't heard a note since.

dear catastrophe waitress is as good as any of the classics

also idk a lot can change in seventeen years lol

what are you talking about, I am exactly the same

anyway I always thought they were great up through Fold Your Hands, which is abysmal, and I haven't heard a note since.

You're missing out on some fantastic music.

DCW was such a seismic shock to me that it took a few months for me to say, "Okay, this might be their best."

All those old threads are well into the period where lots of people were ready to be bored with Belle and Sebastian. If there were a 1998 thread it would be barely alloyed fankidism.

yeah i almost said something similar

love that there's a side poll for best EPs--B&S is the band that taught me what an EP was lol

Not listened to the back end of Tigermilk for so long. We Rule the School just made me bawl. (I'm sick; I'm never sick - Brad was right: they're perfect.)

And, not seen it mentioned yet, but Seymour Stein will be top 5 for me.

same, most likely.

Belle and Sebastian - The Model >>>>> Kraftwerk - The Model

I’m getting sick rn so this works out perfectly. I’ll probably have “I Know Where the Summer Goes” on my ballot, lovely song.

Will be voting in this, which gives me a cause to finally acknowledge my most glaring blind spot: Dear Catastrophe Waitress. I can sort of understand how I missed it: Fold Your Hands... let me down when it came out, and I skipped right over it (ditto the Solondz soundtrack they did, though that is obviously less essential). Less understandable is that I never went back to it, as The Life Pursuit floored me when it came out, and is still my fave B&S album. I’ve heard “Step into My Office Baby” and the Mike Piazza song, but the rest of the album will be new to me.

dangit, i want to get sick. i'm missing out

tbh a few songs on DCW annoy me pretty strongly, though the highs are incredible

Roy Walker is a bit of a stinker.

I assume "Push Barman..." does not count as an album?

XP: I never need to hear *ducks* "Step Into My Office, Baby" ever again, but I distinctly recall being all "YES! Exactly the right move!" upon hearing previews of "Stay Loose" and "I'm a Cuckoo" after the dead end of Fold Your Hands....

And Push Barman is fine for the albums poll, as far as I'm concerned. Likewise Third Eye Centre and the BBC thingy.

i think it'd be a lot of fun to listen to this band chronologically so i'm gonna give that a shot while assembling my ballot

a few years ago i made a playlist of all my favorite b&s songs and i think it flows really well for being 50 songs long https://open.spotify.com/user/unbornwhiskey/playlist/4EvRvOmaS4T7qjh6kEkJjI?si=_cwi_GFdRRS-SE82nZSgFA

XP: I never need to hear *ducks* "Step Into My Office, Baby"

Yes. I'm going back to Dear Catastrophe Waitress for the first time in years and it's way better than I remember, after the first two songs which will not be on my ballot.

fair warning, im gonna vote for their cover of The Boys Are Back in Town as my #1

ok i won't, but it certainly might make my top 30

I've never heard that but I feel like I can imagine exactly what it sounds like (and it rules?)

i'm halfway through tigermilk and this is gonna be a tough poll

you guys are nuts, dear catastrophe waitress starts strong stays strong

i guess that's why we do the poll!

first run-through of my ballot has 8 songs from sinister on it...

First run through is 34 songs and nothing post DCW. I need to do some listening (and could do with some recommendations...).

Yeah I both a) want to give a fair listen to post-DCW material and b) don't really know how to cut down DCW and before to 30 songs...

I Want the World to Stop from Write About Love and Play For Today from Girls in Peacetime stood way out to me on those moderately disappointing albums.

Play for Today and Cat with the Cream destined for my ballot.

Write About Love and I Didn't See It Coming stand a good chance as well.

Nobody's Empire from Girls in Peacetime will be top ten on my ballot, you should definitely check that out.

What do people reckon about PTBBOTS / Songs for Children? One song or two?

They're not obviously related as compositions, but they've never been issued as separate tracks. Hmmmmm. Perhaps we can separate them if someone expresses a desire to vote for the latter independently of the former. Otherwise...

"the book of you" from girls in peacetime is top ten and maybe even top five b&s for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yDPPdqyW8w

oh yeah "nobody's empire" is also way up there

Well damn I already submitted my ballot sans "Push Barman..." but it is far and away my favourite B&S "album" (as was the CD-R I made from a friend's 3-EP boxset before "Barman..." was released)

Stuart Murdoch basically hits the ball when he writes one of his signature traipsing melodies (e.g. the verses of "Beautiful", the whole of "Piazza, New York Catcher") and pairs it with a deliciously misanthropic sentiment. I've thought for hours about "I was moved to kick the crutches from my crippled friend / my crippled friend" which is enormously difficult to unpack-- the character is an asshole for kicking crutches, the songwriter himself is an asshole for singing "crippled", and yet the line seems to be loving, the repetition of "my crippled friend" suggests a commemorative quality to the moment. Or the entirely of "Lazy Jane" which is both gaze-y upon its subject and simultaneously appreciative, tossing off a "and... she's bisexual? not that there's anything.." moment with the boy/girl flip on the choruses. I can't really figure out of this kind of Jerk Protagonist lyrical approach is just a revision of Morrissey or if Murdoch has invented his own unique brand of sympathetic assholism

Their song 'Are You Coming Over For Christmas?' pretty much always makes it onto my alternative xmas mixes. We'll see how festive I am come poll submission.

XP: I think the first thing I did with Napster was construct exactly such an EP compilation. Barman might be my #1 too. Happy to accept amendments!

I can't really justify voting for anything later than oooh... "I'm Waking Up To Us" maybe? I always loved the performative melodrama in that one.

The first thing I've noticed going through these (I've got through the first 2 LPs and first 2 EPs) is that the opaque coyness I originally suspected to be about being gay is actually more like opaque coyness about being Christian. I'm fine with this now, but do wonder whether it would have put me off had I realised at the time I was listening to Christian rock.

I've thought for hours about "I was moved to kick the crutches from my crippled friend / my crippled friend" which is enormously difficult to unpack-- the character is an asshole for kicking crutches, the songwriter himself is an asshole for singing "crippled", and yet the line seems to be loving, the repetition of "my crippled friend" suggests a commemorative quality to the moment.

I thought it was less that he’s an asshole and more that he’s having delusions of being a faith healer, but I’ve never been quite clear on exactly what’s going on in the song. I do love that it’s one of those songs where each line changes the story.

Swear i think this might be their best song, maybe it just makes me a bit 'emo' because a girl i know said it helped her at a difficult time. It's about Stuart Murdoch's illness (ME) that he had when he was young and he shares towards the end the sage advice he received about how one might conquer fears/difficulties generally. I think it's everything a song should be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgb8am3NQU0

Jonathan David will place high in my ballot. Such a singalong (if you share my talent for hitting high notes)

This is... much harder than initially thought. About 80% done, already pushing 40 tracks.

Ok, nearly done but almost forgot that I know one of the people in their songs (friend of SM's wife). Here he is dragging her out to dance on her eponymous song around 3:20:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XIWLMgXJBY

Better angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vazADLsUSiQ

mad how much i love that song but still couldn't fit into a top thirty, what a catalogue!

Ballot submitted!!! I didn’t think I had it in me.

Awesome! But was that emailed? I don't seem to have received anything half an hour later...

got it...just need to clean up for the poll runner.
cutting to 30 was brutal. surprisingly found I like the weird stuff like a century of elvis/beyond the sunrise.

i like beyond the sunrise too (although it should have been placed on an ep, i think, because it doesn't really fit in with anything else)

i'm going to finish up my ballot tonight. i'll probably be one of those lame ones that stick mainly to the earlier material, but i did discover/rediscover several newer songs through this poll that will make it as well!

Fun fact: The love has been fairly well distributed in ballots. If you leave aside some of the film score snippets and the demo-only stuff, the pre-hiatus material that HASN'T yet received any votes seems to amount to one (!) album track and a few mid-00's b-sides. And the coverage is only slightly patchier post-2010.

speaks to the amazing depth of their discography

voted! (hopefully)
"The Rollercoaster Ride" moved up my rankings every time I looked at it, eventually landing in the top 5.

I also voted! My ballot mostly is mostly filled with earlier stuff, but I did include some tracks from the past few albums. I never really made it through Human Problems though.

i still haven't voted, i still am very sorry, and i still promise to get my ballot in today

Okay, I think we're just waiting for Karl Malone and Van Horn Street now. :)

I need to go out for perhaps six hours and then I've have a look at how things are going. Any other ballots that might arrive in that period will be happily tabulated too, of course.

Incidentally, if anyone sent one at any stage and didn't get a reply, then something has gone awry!

sent!

i kept dropping "dylan in the movies" down a bit during the long piano solo in the middle of the song, but then bumping it back during the "If we all went back to another time / I will love you over" section

so uh, does anyone know a band that has instrumental twee that sounds like belle and sebastian? or even a soft voice on top of chamber music that sounds like stuff belle and sebastian could of made?

Nick Drake?

Camera Obscura?

Damien Jurado?

commercials for health insurance for dogs?

SM literally produced Camera Obscura, so

The Left Banke.

about to send!

^ Which makes it...50 ballots!

that's so great! I haven't participated in a lot of these polls, but that seem like a lot

So psyched for this

Voted!

Room for one more?

Yep!

Also: did Van Horn Street survive his/her exam?

So excited to see the results of this. I voted early, without listening back to any of their music. Ever since I've been on a nonstop B&S listening kick, listened back through all of it. There's definitely some songs I should have voted for, but no looking back.

^ Similar here. I was just thinking before that my most persistent earworms this week were things like "Poor Boy", "Come On Sister", "Didn't See It Coming" and "Power of Three", none of which were even close to being on my list. They could probably sustain a career on their second and third tier songs alone.

Okay, I'll start closing this now.

I'll take what I have to be the final numbers for the albums and EPs (the order, at least, looks to be quite stable now anyway) and get that ready for the countdown thread. I might be able to start that as early as late evening, my time. (Perhaps midday GMT)

If Van Horn Street still has a tracks ballot to submit, hopefully I'll see that in the next few hours.

Results thread:

Could we please be objective cause the other POLLS are queuing up behind us - Artist Poll #94 - Belle & Sebastian - RESULTS