Belle and Sebastian
Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant

THE REVIEW

This album is a life lesson: it teaches you that dreams are beautiful, but at some point, they become strange and unsettling, and when you realize it, it means you are about to wake up. That's what happened with Belle and Sebastian. A dream lasting three albums, each one more beautiful than the last, each one more moving than the last, each one more praised than the last, then something starts to change, everything is still beautiful, but you feel that it's not like before, that everything will soon end, and in fact, it's already over.
Stuart David, the historic bassist, had just left, but we (the royal we) were convinced that nothing would change, that, after all, Stuart Murdoch was the true soul of the group, and that the only truly indispensable thing was the gracious voice of Isobel Campbell. The illusion held with this album, but it collapsed miserably with the subsequent releases, which, regardless of what one might say (and opinions differ), are at least embarrassing for those who had written the masterpieces they had written.

The album…oh yes, the album…what do you want me to say…it's a Belle and Sebastian record, people who write (used to write) and play music DIVINELY. But who start to lose their way. And so, use tricks of the trade to make up for it. It's a bit like they put liquor in this cake to cover the taste of the cream that was beginning to sour.
Belle and Sebastian rely on sumptuous arrangements (strings in abundance, trumpets, flutes, organs, and even harpsichords), and when that's not enough, they try with the disarming innocence of tracks like “Family Tree”, as unbearably naive as it is irresistible, that after listening to it, you'd love to be in a Glasgow pub and offer a drink to Isobel, the sweetest creature on earth.
In the end, you tend to overlook the less successful episodes (“Don’t Leave The Light On Baby”, “Nice Day for a Sulk”) and get dazzled by the undeniable musical mastery of ours, who in “The Model”, “Waiting For The Moon To Rise”, and “Wrong Girl” demonstrate, as usual, their prowess, and quite a lot of it.

It is said that before this album, Belle and Sebastian had to record in four or five days, while here for the first time, they were given unlimited time and means, given the success they had now achieved. Maybe this broke the spell; the fact is that since then, nothing has been the same anymore and two years later, Campbell would also leave the company.