Quiet English ecstasy, if you're feeling cryptic

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN

If You're Feeling Sinister (Jeepster)

I don't much care for winsomeness. Previously in these pages I've shredded the entire roster of K Records, who happily allow grown boys and girls to regress to pre-adolescent levels of lyric and technique, as well as those of Sarah Records, who mimicked the K sound in Britain, thrilling K fans and irritating me. But there are those of you who will maintain that Beat Happening and the Field Mice express emotion in a no less pure form than a Blake poem. While I'm not quite ready to admit Boyracer (a couple of winsome people on a bad day) to the Western Canon, Belle and Sebastian have managed to convince me that winsomeness is not just an emotional cheese grater.

If the cryptic liner notes are to be believed, Belle and Sebastian are a six-piece from somewhere around London. They like quiet, mildly orchestral arrangements--acoustic guitar, jazzy piano, and quiet strings and horns on occasion. They also like long song titles that ooze Morrissey-like snideness and oversensitivity.

But if they stole their textures from the Tindersticks, Belle and Sebastian abandon the melodrama and regret of that band for airy winsomeness. Singer Stevie "Winsome" Jackson's chirpy, near-constant falsetto is incapable of dramatic heaviness. Even when crooning "Get me away from here, I'm dying," he still sounds more adorable than miserable (not a good thing). The music sometimes spills over into amateur-hour preciousness. But Belle and Sebastian get away with it, and leave a lump of gorgeous tunes behind, too.

Why does If You're Feeling Sinister work? On the best track, "The Stars of Track and Field," Jackson's voice soars rather than recedes--and it's on key! Instruments balance each other instead of spilling into everything else. The simple acoustic guitar and spare bass shadow Jackson as he sings about boys and girls. Almost unnoticeably, the song grows faster and louder into the chorus, where Jackson actually sings instead of cooing. And everything's beautiful.

Not all of the songs reach the same gentle heights, but are still enough to convince the hardest cynic that all is right with the world. "Seeing Other People" voices discontent over a hypnotic piano riff; "The Fox in the Snow" mixes violin and boy/girl vocals to inexplicably moving effect. The only mortal sins are "Me and the Major," which proves that upbeat cuteness is annoying no matter what, and "Judy and the Dream of Horses," which leads you with a leprous hand into the pit of touchy-feely Barneyland. It ends the album and leaves the taste of NutraSweet in your mouth, but that only goes to show how hard it was for the band to avoid those traps for the first 35 minutes of the album.

I'll admit Belle and Sebastian's virtues ungrudgingly. For most of the album, they rescue emotions I considered beyond redemption. They make something out of a style of music that previously lingered somewhere between vulnerable feyness and plain old crap. It makes it all the more a shame that this album will never be released in this country, much less heard. Import plus indie plus mass apathy does not equal sales. But really, if you're sick of K product (or, especially, if you aren't), you should seek this one out, because Stevie Jackson could crush Calvin Johnson.

--David Auerbach

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