Consumer Guide Album

Belle and Sebastian: Tigermilk [Matador, 1999]
It's their 1996 U.K. debut, done cheap back when school was the main thing they knew. So they made up songs idealizing the yearnings of every sexually confused young person who ever sat alone in a lunchroom humming a Chills song. Soaring wistfully above a misery recollected from something like last week, Stuart Murdoch clearly believes these kids are superior beings. But he's so nonconfrontational in his elitism that only a jock wouldn't root for them. A-