Album: If You’re Feeling Sinister.
Year: 1996.
Normally, when something is absolutely perfect in its preciousness, I focus far more on the preciousness than the perfection. But not in the case of Belle & Sebastian’s wuss-rock classic If You’re Feeling Sinister, which I love almost as much as Love’s Forever Changes, which I’ve always seen as one of their key influences.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved this album – as epitomized by this almost-energetic title track – far more than antecedents like Prefab Sprout or Aztec Camera. Not to mention, in 1995, after a half-decade of loud guitars, Belle & Sebastian felt nearly as radical of an indie-rock left turn as, say, The Chemical Brothers.
And just like The Chemical Brothers, this record gives me intense flashbacks of working at Organic Online in the middle of the dot-com era, when somebody (not just me!) would always seem to be putting this on the communal CD player that served as the soundtrack of building out the early websites for evil multinational corporations like Sony, Nike & McDonalds.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only person at that company who waited and waited for the genius chorus to finally show up as the song was half over.
But if you are feeling sinister
Go off and see a minister
He’ll try in vain to take away the pain of being a hopeless unbeliever
“If You’re Feeling Sinister” on Spotify
Pitchfork Oral History of Making of If You’re Feeling Sinister
My Certain Songs Playlist on Spotify