New Belle & Sebastian: The Life Pursuit
This week has been a great week in terms of 2006 album leaks (but not nearly as great in terms of finals and term papers). Late last week Jenny Lewis new solo album sprung a leak and gave us all something to be excited about, and as if that wasn’t enough, Belle & Sebastian’s upcoming LP, The Life Pursuit, which doesn’t come out until February 7th (!!) trickled onto the internet two days ago (UPDATE: Blake Sennet [of Rilo Kiley’s] second album from his solo project The Elected just leaked, as did the new Strokes release… so check back for that later). While I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest Belle & Sebastian fan (I have almost all of their releases, but I wouldn’t say they’re one of my favorite bands), I do enjoy their blissful harmonies, whimsical stylings and their brand of catchy shoegazing indie rock. While I haven’t listened to the new album enough to really come to a conclusion about how it stacks up against their previous releases, I have been enjoying two of the songs immensely: lead single “Funny Little Frog” and the wonderful “White Collar Boy”. “White Collar Boy” opens with a dirty synth line (think the the opening synth line of The Faint’s “Glass Danse”… or maybe that’s just me) and features wonderful sing-song choruses and harmonizing back-up vocals. The fact that the lead single’s title is “Funny Little Frog” is enough of a reason for me to like it, but then lead singer Stuart Murdoch rhymes “poet” with “funny little frog in my throat” (think: “thro-et”) and I’m sold. Download those two below, along with my all-time favorite B&S song, “The Boy With An Arab Strap”.
Also, I’d like to take this time to draw attention to one of my favorite music sites on the internet, Red Light Glow. RLG posts full albums to make them available for download, sometimes upwards of 20 in one day, and is the go-to place for all the latest advances and leaks (I picked up both the new Jenny Lewis and the new B&S from there, and they just yesterday posted the new Beck remix album, Guerolito), as well as older great albums and lots of rarities (I grabbed Stars’ tour-only EP, Dead Child Stars, from there the other day). They even have a request section where you can request an album and they’ll do their best to post it, and more often than not they come through. If illegal downloading is your thing, then I couldn’t recommend this site more. However, the site uses Rapidshare for all downloading, so if you don’t know how to use that, go here for a very easy and very helpful tutorial courtesy of the Regnyouth Archives (another fantastic downloading site).
NOTE: Good Weather For Airstrikes does not condone illegal downloading. Support the artists. Any leaked album I download I make sure to purchase when it’s eventually released, and most of the other albums I download are not yet available in the United States, and I download them only as an alternative to paying ridiculous import prices.
MP3s:
“White Collar Boy” - Belle & Sebastian [highly recommended]
“Funny Little Frog” - Belle & Sebastian
“The Boy With An Arab Strap” - Belle & Sebastian [highly recommended]
You can also head over to You Ain’t No Picasso to download two more tracks, the live and album versions of “Another Sunny Day”, another stand out track on the album.