Belle And Sebastian
If You're Feeling Sinister: Live At The Barbican

THE REVIEW

Operation Nostalgia. The freshman college dorm room abroad, the harsh autumn, the turtleneck sweaters back in fashion, the new wine of the Bolognese taverns, the afternoons spent wandering between the bookstore shelves, the endless and inconclusive discussions about politics. And above all, the reddish cover CD of a so-called Scottish band ("where the heck do you find these groups?") with a ridiculous and improbable name, a title that sounds like a psychotropic slogan, "If you're Feeling Sinister," a record that gets under your skin and that you will carry inside forever, like a piece of your genetic code.

Ten years have passed, it seems like a century, and the nostalgia operation is signed by Belle & Sebastian, releasing online (iTunes Store, as usual) the live version of that album, recorded at the Barbican in London in September 2005, as part of the "Don't Look Back" Series (organized by All Tomorrow's Parties, one of the major independent music festivals in Great Britain), performances where artists play live and in full one album from their discography.

Apparently, Stuart Murdoch was never very satisfied with the arrangements of the original version of "If you're Feeling Sinister." Too minimalist and low-fi for his (latest) tastes that require a profusion of baroque orchestrations and polished deviations between glam and funk. Put this way, the intention of proposing those songs today sounded almost sacrilegious, and the mere idea that Tony Hoffer, shameless producer of "The Life Pursuit," could extend his evil influence to "If you're Feeling Sinister" was already stomach-churning.

But instead, the worst fears are unfounded, and this "Live at the Barbican," in truth released a few months before "The Life Pursuit," is pleasant to listen to and really manages to integrate and enrich some weaker passages of the original recordings. Murdoch and company unleash a 12-member band for this performance, but the spirit of the album remains unchanged: intimate, minimalistic, melancholic, and irreverent at the same time, in a word, "twee-pop" in its essence.

The opening of "Stars of Track and Field" is almost indistinguishable from the original version, if it weren't for the show of strength in the last 10 seconds with the whole band pushing the accelerator. The massive presence of strings is the real novelty, and if there are indeed songs that gain from the conquest of high fidelity ("Seeing Other People"), in many cases, they sound artificial and redundant ("If you're Feeling Sinister" and "The Boy Done Wrong Again").

But what pleases the most about this performance by Belle & Sebastian is the realization of how their maturity still manages to marry the desire to have fun and entertain: the performance of "Me & The Major" borders on perfection, the groove that changes speed with each beat, and the devilish mouth harmonica that draws applause on the open stage, proof of a technical mastery long conquered (it's no secret that the live performances of early Belle & Sebastian often left something to be desired). Today, as then, the record shows no weak points and continues to thrill in particular moments: "Like Dylan in the Movies" with the strangled trumpet of Mick Cooke at the end and "Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying" 'archetype of Belle & Sebastian's sound with the guitar arpeggios and Hammond organ phrases.

And so the nostalgia operation succeeds fully, and, indeed, one must be very careful not to get too involved, or you even risk a tear at the remembrance of the good old days.