Track Listing

1. It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career
2. Sleep the Clock Around
3. Is It Wicked Not to Care?
4. Ease Your Feet in the Sea
5. Summer Wasting
6. Seymour Stein
7. Space Boy Dream
8. Dirty Dream Number Two
9. Boy With the Arab Strap
10. Chickfactor
11. Simple Things
12. Rollercoaster Ride

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7539 in Music
• Released on: 1998-09-08
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Album Description
The quirky Glaswegian outfit's highly acclaimed & highly anticipated 1998 album featuring 12 timeless pop songs that are neither pretentious nor too cute. A 1998 Jeepster/ Matador release.

Amazon.com's Best of 1998
Belle and Sebastian follow up the considerable promise of 1997's fantastic If You're Feeling Sinister with an album that is, unbelievably, even better. The Boy with the Arab Strap is an immediately infectious and delicious pastiche of fey, Nick Drake-ian vocals; lilting pop melodies; shimmery arrangements; croony wonder; and tortured, lit-smart lyrics. Belle and Sebastian are smarter than the Smiths, wittier than the Beach Boys, more fun than the Velvet Underground, and even more inscrutable than R.E.M. That's heavy company, but The Boy with the Arab Strap proves they deserve to be belles of the ball. --Tod Nelson

Amazon.com
This highly anticipated album from Belle and Sebastian arrives with every hope satisfied. Each song is a cunning short story that wraps itself around you like a cozy couch throw. The loose theme running through this 12-song reverie is seduction. It plays out in both the drowsy sexual hopes of principal songwriter Stuart Murdoch's idle protagonists and the giddiness of bandmate Stevie Jackson's "Seymour Stein" and "Chickfactor," which document his bewitchment by the city of New York and its beautiful girls and florid pitchmen. The complex arrangements favor a whimsical diversity best experienced in "Sleep the Clock Around," which features synthesizer bloops, trumpets, and bagpipes! If you haven't figured out that this Scottish eight-piece deserves every iota of hype it's receiving, it's time to have your ears checked and your record collection gone over by a certified professional. --Lois Maffeo

Customer Reviews

My favorite album of all time ever
I first heard about Belle and Sebastian from a friend of mine who had also turned me on to Kings of Convenience. I went out and bought this CD as soon as I could. I didn't really get into it at first and I didn't really understand what some of the songs were about. But the album grew on me. The songs are timeless, they conjure up the ghosts of late 60s pioneers like Love and Nick Drake, while always sounding modern and in touch with today's alienated youth. But now that I have listened to these twelve songs thousands of times, the thing that draws me back the Boy with the Arab Strap is the MOOD. Autumnal, like leaves falling but with a hint of summer still lingering and winter waiting at the door. Like "The Graduate" or a Wes Anderson movie, graceful and beautiful, with equal measures of humor, sorrow and tenderness.
If you haven't already, buy this CD and prepare yourself for the most subtle and gorgeous forty-five minutes of your life.

Soothingly Beautiful.
Belle & Sebastian is something magical, so magical and amazing that at first glance they seem like nothing. It takes a while to sink in, and in that time their music tends to confuse you, for you've never heard something like this before. But after time, Belle & Sebastian will earn a spot in your heart as one of the most pleasant songcrafters you will ever hear.

The Boy With The Arab Strap is an incredible piece of work by Belle & Sebastian. The entire album stays majestical and gives you an ultimate sense of relaxation, but very strangely sneaks brass instruments in, without you even realizing how loud and out of place the trumpets can be at times. Stuart Murdoch's vocals are (as the music backing it) soothing, and stay fluent as he pumps out fairy-tale lyrics.

'It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career' starts the album off, very slowly. It sets the stage up for 'Sleep The Clock Around', a track which no one can put down. It starts soft, but includes sharp trumpets. 'Is It Wicked Not To Care' has female vocals, followed by 'Ease Your Feet In The Sea', which really does give you the 'beach' mindpicture. The album stays pretty consistant, stopping for the spoken-voice over instrumentals interlude 'A Space Boy Dream'. The album ends on a soft, yet high note with 'The Rollercoaster Ride'.

I really don't have too many things bad to say about this album. If I could give it 4.5 stars, I would. Get this album.

Good, solid music - pure and simple
Every so often, you buy a CD that is a "press play, leave on" CD - one that has enough enjoyability and variety to be listened to the whole way through...I found that here. Some people have a hard time considering music with vocals of such softness - rock; but the simple fact here is that this is an album where most of the power comes in the lyrics - which could stand alone as poetry, and in the subtle and clean instrumentation - which is nothing less than perfect. I know that it is already hard to imagine an alnum so good through all of my flowery, fawning words, but - one listen straight through and you too will be sold. This album has out and out, impossible-not-to-dance-to songs (Dirty Dream #2 and the title track), breathy atmospheric gems (Ease Your Feet in the sea, Chickfactor, Seymour Stein- a brilliant song) as well as grinding, undefinable, songs with no genre or label (the amazing "Simple Things," and the equally great "A Spaceboy Dream"). This is one to buy, because there really is nothing quite like it available anywhere from anyone - and as the band shy away from public acclaim (turned down several major-label deals to sign with small Scottish label "Jeepster") they strengthen the unique nature of their sound which has only gotten better with each flawlessly produced album. Maybe not pure mosh, pyrotechnic, guitar smash rock, and maybe not pure troubador ballads - but a great piece of arranged music nonetheless and an entirely enjoyable addition to any collection.