Belle and Sebastian - Tigermilk
Artist: Belle and Sebastian
Author: Sarah
Date: 11/17/2024
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify
I've always had a soft spot for the albums that come before The Album, the ones that foreshadow what's about to come, but also offer glimpses of the other ways things might have happened. Albums like What We Did on Our Holidays, Something Else by the Kinks, or especially Tigermilk.
Obviously, much of this album could fit comfortably on If You're Feeling Sinister, with songs like "The State I Am In" or "Expectations" being of the blueprint that Belle and Sebastian would follow for the next several years. But to me, the real appeal is in the directions they didn't take. The most successful of these experiments, to me, is the baroque pop of "We Rule the School" and "Mary Jo"; those weepy arrangements are always toeing the line between heartbreaking and melodramatic, both of which are moods I happen to enjoy in my music. They'd come back to this sound (or at least its cousin) a bit on Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (especially "The Model"), but not to quite the same success.
As I write this, I actually realize that they really did come back later to go further down all these directions they experimented with. The baroque pop reoccurs on Fold Your Hands Child, as previously mentioned, but the harder edged rock of "You're Just a Baby" comes back with more confidence on The Life Pursuit, and "Electronic Renaissance" arguably gets a full album treatment on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, though obviously none of these to the same acclaim as the bedroom folk they perfected with If You're Feeling Sinister.
In that sense, Tigermilk is less a document of a band finding their footing, and more a miniature of their entire career. In that sense, Belle and Sebastian are like the indie rock Garden of Forking Paths; their entire career has been showing the outcomes of every possible choice they could have made from this starting point.