Search - Belle & Sebastian :: Fold Your Hands Child You Walk Like a Peasant

Nice Day for a Mood

Thomas K. Emanuel | Deadwood, SD USA | 07/05/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Now, everybody and their grandmother (well, assuming their grandmother listens to Belle & Sebastian) knows that this is pretty much Stuart Murdoch's band. On FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT (2000) he's in fine fey form as ever: "The Model," "Women's Realm", and "There's Too Much Love" strike me especially as minor classics in the B&S canon. However, apparently wishing to prove that Belle & Sebastian are a true band, and not just a vehicle for his brilliantly wistful vision, Murdoch pulls a Paul McCartney circa 1976 and opens the floor to his bandmates.



The results, if they aren't quite up to Murdoch's usual standards, aren't half as bad as the critics would have you believe. Stevie Jackson's "The Wrong Girl" is a nice uptempo (if not upbeat) number; the Isobel Campbell-sung "Family Tree", an airy, tongue-in-cheek "nonconformist" kind of song; and Sarah Martin's wispy "Waiting for the Moon to Rise", near-classic B&S. Which brings me to an interesting point: Belle & Sebastian isn't an especially powerful group. In order for a vocalist to get overwhelmed by their sound, they'd pretty much have to be trying. But both Martin and Campbell nearly manage it. That's not a knock - I love their tiffany little voices - but the fact remains that both girls sing with all the force of a fine lace curtain. And then "Don't Leave the Light on Baby", credited to the entire band and built on a ghostly electric piano line, is unlike anything I've heard yet from the band, and pretty much everybody gets out for a turn on the aforementioned "Women's Realm". However, not everything clicks: "Beyond the Sunrise", a Jackson/Campbell duet, falls rather flat, for instance.



In terms of sound, FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT is very much of a piece with Belle & Sebastian's contemporaneous EPs. This means that the record falls somewhere between the band's sleepier early work and the bolder sound of later efforts: they've gained some muscle and the arrangements are a little more ambitious, featuring lots more strings, but the power (on a relative scale, of course) of their post-2003 work isn't quite there yet. However, this is still an excellent record, and a nice showcase for the talent in the band that we may not have noticed in Stuart's shadow."