Rock & Roll has always been a genre of music that deals best with visceral, powerful emotions. Love, sexual desire, anger, frustration, grief, depression: all of these feelings translate more or less perfectly onto Rock’s color palette. For much of my youth, and leading into my college years, the music that I most identified with traded in those wares. It was not until I was in college and a friend of mine introduced me to Scottish Indie Pop band Belle & Sebastian that I had thought a Pop or Rock group could be predominately intelligent, witty, even charming. Their second record, If You’re Feeling Sinister, became my in-road to Indie Pop, Twee, and half dozen other subgenres that allowed me to explore the minutiae of the everyday within the confines of Pop Music.

If You’re Feeling Sinister is an album about sex and romance like many, many other Pop albums, but it is also an album about all the other day-to-day issues of being a twentysomething intellectual. Lead-off track “The Stars of Track And Field”, a song about a young girl kissing other girls in school, “a honey with a following of innocent boys,” acutely describes a type of young woman many of us know and can relate to, someone who is exploring their sexuality openly, though perhaps at the expense of those around them. Later, on “Seeing Other People”, two sexually curious young men “lay on the bed there, kissing just for practice”. One of the remarkable things about the content of these songs (credited to the fantastic lyricism of lead singer Stuart Murdoch) is how nonchalantly the concept of youth sexuality is handled. So much of the music we grow up with takes the sexual longing of adolescence and amplifies it onto a widescreen, turning it up to 11, as it were. Throughout If You’re Feeling Sinister, Murdoch and the characters he sings about are navigating their sexual awakenings with curiosity, tentatively, and most certainly disposed to not making a large fuss about it.

In many ways, If You’re Feeling Sinister perfectly captures the moment when teenagers become young adults and they begin to more fully understand the world around them, even if in retrospect that worldview seems trite or naive. On “Me And The Major”, Murdoch looks at divisions of age, culture, and class, carrying on a conversation with an older man who “remembers all the Punks / And the hippies, too / And he remembers Roxy Music in ’72.” Rather than rally against these divisions or challenge the status quo, Murdoch’s narrator seems uninterested in the debate, remarking “I want a dance, I want a drink of whisky so I forget the Major and go up the town because the snow is falling.” It’s a feeling I could certainly relate to. When I was 21, the last thing I cared about was how much better my parents or grandparents generation had it. I was more than content to read my books, listen to my records, and go out with my friends into the evening to find some new experience to latch onto.

The things that do bother Murdoch’s characters, however, are universal to young adults, and are perfectly summed up on the album’s title track. Over an introduction of schoolchildren playing and soon joined by a soft, jangling acoustic guitar, Murdoch laments the deaths of Anthony and Hillary, two young people who seem to have committed suicide after experiencing an existential crisis and a quest for faith. Like many other young people searching for the meaning of life, they search for answers wherever they feel they might find them. Hillary is “into S&M and Bible Studies, not everyone’s cup of tea” while Anthony chooses to end his life because “if there’s something else beyond he isn’t scared because it’s bound to be less boring than today, bound to be less boring than tomorrow.” “If You’re Feeling Sinister” might seem comically maudlin on paper, but the band’s delivery, especially Murdoch’s soft brogue, lends an air of sincerity and solemnity it might otherwise not have achieved.

Heartbreak, visceral and true, does play an important role on If You’re Feeling Sinister, however. On “Like Dylan In The Movies”, Murdoch confesses to someone that they “are worth the trouble, worth the pain, […] worth the worry” and confides “If we all went back to another time I would love you over.” On the previously mentioned “Seeing Other People” the all-important line after the title cheekily admits “Seeing other people, as least that’s what we say we’re doing.” So often during our late teens and early twenties we get involved in flings only for it to turn serious imperceptibly over time. An unfortunately and likely scenario in “Seeing Other People” is that one of the young men is quite serious about it and the other is not, and curiosity could easily lead to heartbreak.

If You’re Feeling Sinister is an album that reminds its listener that one can be cultured and intellectual while being an emotional wreck, and it is that confluence of forces that often makes young adulthood so unique. Here one finds themselves learning new ideas and concepts, exposed to great art and culture, breaking free of their traditions, and realizing that on the other side one still has to deal with the things that people of any gender, sexual orientation, creed, or experience struggle with. it is also an album that finds the humor and the slight ridiculousness in such things, and portrays them with a knowing wink as a means of lightening the emotional load they may often leave.