Search And Destroy: Belle And Sebastian

Agree with devvine, and re 'Jonathan David'.

Also 'chick factor' quite possibly Jackson's best song of all.

I confirm my view that the best of HUMAN PROBLEMS is

Best Friends
We Were Beautiful
Too Many Tears
A Plague On Other Boys
I'll Be Your Pilot

I'm fond of 'The Wrong Girl' without loving it. I think the arrangements are the best thing about it - something true of what is, overall, a pretty ordinary album.

Love:
Too Much Love
The Model
Women's Realm

Like:
The Wrong Girl
I Fought in A War
Don't Leave the Light On
The Chalet Lines

Eh:
The rest

As for Stevie songs, I'd put 'Seymour Stein' in the top tier and also like 'Chickfactor' and 'Jonathan David'.

these are all top 30 b&s:

Woman's Realm
Family Tree
There's Too Much Love
I Fought In A War
The Model
Don't Leave The Light On, Baby

I find the out of tune intro to The Wrong Girl just makes me immediately skip.

Only top 30 B&S track on the LP for me is Woman's Realm, and even that's not top 20.

Don't like Women's Realm much - bit of a plodding indie-disco retread of past glories

Top tier:
I Fought in a War
The Model
Waiting for the Moon to Rise
Don't Leave the Light on Baby
There's Too Much Love

Lovely
Family Tree

OK
The Wrong Girl
Nice Day for a Sulk
Women's Realm

No thanks
Beyond the Sunrise
The Chalet Lines

Agree with Alba! Good calls, Alba.

But this is the 4th B&S LP, from 23 years ago - basically it's very good.

Finding the gold on HUMAN PROBLEMS - that's harder.

A top 10 B&S since, what ... 2010? That would be a tougher task. There is a fair amount of good material but it's scattered around and lots of us haven't even heard every song.

Human Problems is probably their weakest release so far, it's true. But Play For Today and I Didn't See It Coming are both top tier tracks for me, and both are post 2010 (well IDSIC is 2020 but that counts surely?)

Unsure that HUMAN PROBLEMS is worse than A BIT OF PREVIOUS, fwiw.

Agree that 'I didn't see it coming' is #1 in this era.

Pinefox Top 10 B&S since 2010:

I didn't see it coming
write about love
read the blessed pages
nobody's empire
the cat with the cream
we were beautiful
best friends
do it for your country
unnecessary drama
working boy in new york city

no Play For Today? just love how that builds and builds to something incredible at the end

No, not very keen on it. But I feel that I have never really managed to get the measure of the second half of that LP. And I have played it a lot!

(fwiw I think I prefer the Cure song of that name.)

that's also one of my favourite cure songs

also a fan of the tv series

cat with the cream really is wonderful

Yes great TV series for sure! :D

devvvine: 'cat with the cream' is a really unusual song, quite mysterious, quite slow burning, a complex construction, and even in its lyric its meanings seem ambiguous. But I think it may be the most ambitious, accomplished and stimulating work on that LP.

Still, I see B&S as Murdoch’s band, and its decline runs parallel with Murdoch’s retreat from Glasgow’s hipster community into staid domestic stability.

xp indeed, a very promising road absolutely not taken from what i've heard from the last few records

Enochroot's top 10 B&S songs since 2010:

A Bit of Previous
Juliet Naked
Working Boy in New York City
Unnecessary Drama
I Want The World To Stop
Play For Today
Do It For Your Country
Nobody's Empire
Every Day's A Lesson in Humility
I'll Be Your Pilot

I tried to come up with a top 10 since 2010, but I could only manage 7 tracks (which gives a good idea of when I lost interest, though I still torrent each new release).

Born to Act
Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John
Sunday’s Pretty Icons
I Want the World to Stop
The Ghost of Rockschool
Enter Sylvia Plath
Play for Today

"Come On Sister" (ctrl-f: 0 results) is not only one of their best post-2010 but I'd slot it comfortably in their all-time top 10.

I don't even know some of those.

And I don't think I knew there was a song called 'a bit of previous' !

The quality of their releases also correlates with who they chose to put on the cover of the album/EP: friends >>> models >>> fans

It correlates with their cover art in general. In 2014 I read one of those DIY articles "How to hang vinyl records on your wall" and I hung up all of B&S’s albums and most of their EPs. Visitors to my home loved it. But then Girls in Peacetime came out and there was no way I was going to display that shit.

I thought the last two LP covers were a slight step up in quality.

some classic era singles and EPs have crap covers - Dog On Wheels, I'm Waking Up To Us, Jonathan David

Not sure I agree with the view that B&S cover art has declined.

Is WRITE ABOUT LOVE much worse than SINISTER? Both are nice.

Unlike poster Camaraderie, I find that DOG ON WHEELS has a magnificent cover - perhaps the most charming in their career.

But then TBWTAS itself has a cover that has always put me off, an ugly picture that says little about the contents and is only redeemed by the deep green cover.

And I'm not sure that the FOLD YOUR HANDS cover is better than THE LIFE PURSUIT.

Maybe more recent 'display the fans' is poor but then LATE DEVELOPERS (which I've never seen in reality) feels like an ep cover from 20+ years earlier.

Overall I think the covers have maintained quite a lot of continuity while also all looking different from each other (due to the colours).

A point that in Sinister List days would have been massively discussed and now maybe never has been:

'If They're Shooting At You' deliberately reuses the melody and chords of the bridge of 'Poor Boy' for its bridge or maybe pre-chorus.

It's a rare case of a songwriter flagrantly repeating the same musical material and presumably feeling it was OK do so. Maybe because few remember 'Poor Boy' anyway.