Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: belle and sebastian, design of a decade, the year 2000
2. Belle And Sebastian, Family Tree
A lot of folks are down on Belle and Sebastian’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant album, and not just because of its lengthy title. I’m not really sure why, though. It’s not as cohesive as Tigermilk or If You’re Feeling Sinister, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the awkward (and even more awkwardly-titled) The Boy With The Arab Strap. Even in 1998, possibly at the height of my B&S fandom, I traded that album after a few weeks for a European-only Suzanne Vega best-of.
FYHC,YWLAP isn’t a perfect album by any means; The Chalet Lines is ugly, and not in a good way, and it took me about eight years before grumpily resigning myself to the fact that I Fought In A War is sort of okay. But, despite that, there’s a lot of great tracks on the album. Songs like The Model, one of Stuart Murdoch’s better numbers about Christianity and somebody named Lisa.
But what makes FYHC,YWLAP better than its predecessor is the vastly improved songwriting on the songs Murdoch didn’t write. Stevie Jackson’s lovely Chickfactor was probably my favorite song on TBWTAS, but he outdid himself by following it up with The Wrong Girl. And Isobel Campbell went from writing one album’s most grating song (Is It Wicked Not To Care?) to writing possibly its best one.
Though it’s not particularly well-regarded among fans, Family Tree was released at a time when I was feeling particularly bitter about things like education and futures and history. My own school experience was dreadful, dictated by a guidance counselor who was always telling me I wouldn’t get into college or amount to anything unless I took economics and two years of chemistry and AP History, for which I had to give up French and Theatre. And I was told not to even try art, because it might bring my GPA down. In 2000, as I was going through something of an existential crisis (I got C-‘s in everything and didn’t go to college at all; ha!) songs like Family Tree and Aimee Mann’s Ghost World resonated with me. And now, with some distance, I think that this song musically evokes all the pastoralia and teenaged ennui that Belle and Sebastian were best at.
[On a marginally related note, do you think the family in this video listened to anything besides the title before choosing this song to go with this video? Or are they really like the mafia?]
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