Belle and Sebastian - 3..6..9 Seconds Of Light (1997)
Track Listing:
1. A Century Of Fakers
2. Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
3. Beautiful
4. Put The Book Back On The Shelf
Belle and Sebastian were a very prolific band in their early days indeed. Not only did they manage to release not one but two, TWO, damn good albums in 1996 (Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister), but they also managed to follow these up the following year with three rather fine EPs Dog On Wheels, Lazy Painter Jane and last but not least the magnificent 3..6..9 Seconds Of Light. Why I chose this EP over the other two is simply because these four tracks seem to encapsulate everything I love about early Belle and Sebastian into just under twenty minutes. That timeless, warm and bittersweet sound that they could pull off so effortlessly and those highly literate lyrics that could rival any great poet.
The bittersweet melodies of ‘A Century of Fakers’ reminds you of the coming of Autumn and the fading memories of the Summer gone by. You will also notice that this song has the exact same backing track as ‘A Century Of Elvis’ from Lazy Painter Jane. But compare that with the up-tempo and teeth-rattling ‘Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie’ which shows that Belle and Sebastian can rock out if they want to. ‘Beautiful’ is a downbeat and touching acoustic-based song which some nicely effective touches of trumpet and strings. Stuart Murdoch’s knack for writing about downtrodden characters always fascinates me and he does this brilliantly with this song. The upbeat swagger of ‘Put the Book Back on the Shelf’ ties this four-track EP together very nicely. And just when you think it’s over there’s a hidden song at the very end called ‘Songs for Children’, which seems to hark back to the faded outro of ‘Beautiful’. It’s a very well put together collection of songs and they exist together as a powerful entity.
If you wanted to you could get all their EPs and non-album singles collected together on the compilation Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, but I prefer to have them individually. The songs just seem to stand out more when you listen to them the way they were originally meant to be listened, plus the associated artwork gives the songs that extra bit of character and group identity. Some could even argue that their EPs are better than their albums but then again they could be right.