Not too long ago, a new Belle and Sebastian album would have been cause for a massive celebration in these parts. I’ve counted the Scottish indie band among my very favorites since I first heard their music in the late 90s.
I was thrilled by all of the band’s (non-soundtrack) studio releases through 2015, when Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance dropped and continued their run of smart, sensitive baroque pop.
It’s a rare Random Weekend twofer, with Belle and Sebastian making an encore appearance.
The selections line up chronologically as well. Yesterday’s song came from a 2001 single, while today’s SOTD appears on the band’s next project, the soundtrack to the 2002 Todd Solondz film Storytelling.
The band and director didn’t work well together, and only six minutes of their music wound up in the finished film.
Today’s track is the B-side (if such a thing exists in the digital world) to Belle and Sebastian’s 2001 CD single ‘Jonathan David.’
The song’s title is a play on the British short story and film The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and the lyrics reference some of that story’s plot points and themes.
OK, last week’s Random Weekend gave us a weird coincidence when a song from Brad Paisley’s first album was followed by a song from his second.
A week later, we get another twofer, with yesterday’s Belle and Sebastian track followed by this one today. I won’t even bother to calculate the odds of back-to-back weekends featuring a single artist. But they gotta be high.
‘The Wrong Girl’ sits right in the middle of Belle and Sebastian’s 2000 album, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, an unassuming little pop gem surrounded by more ambitious material.
This song has everything you want from a Belle and Sebastian tune: jaunty acoustic guitar, strings, a trumpet solo, lyrics about a lovelorn loser. It also lets band member Stevie Jackson take over for Stuart Murdoch on vocals, which he does a couple of times per album with great results.
Meet Me In Montauk 