The Boy with the Arab Strap

"The Boy with the Arab Strap" announces itself with a brass fanfare that feels both celebratory and slightly ironic — a fanfare for ordinary people, for afternoons with nothing particular to recommend them. Stuart Murdoch's vocals arrive conversationally, almost as though he's narrating from just behind your shoulder, and the song accumulates characters the way a Saturday in a mid-sized city accumulates small observations: a girl in a record shop, a boy with ambitions quietly collapsing, the texture of young lives not yet shaped into anything definitive. The rhythm section is unusually propulsive for Belle and Sebastian, the tambourine and bass guitar giving the whole thing a modest swagger that the lyrics keep undercutting with self-awareness. This is one of the defining songs of late-nineties Glasgow indie, a document of a specific subculture — record shops, bedsits, the romance of mundanity — that the band both inhabited and gently satirized. Isobel Campbell joins toward the end and the song opens into something looser, more communal, almost like a party forming around a kitchen table. It's music for young people who feel slightly sideways to their surroundings and have chosen to make that feeling their aesthetic rather than their problem.