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CDs

Belle And Sebastian

Storytelling

(Jeepster)

Film-maker Todd Solondz's latest take on sex in American suburbia also stabs at the treatment of the issue in movies such as American Beauty and Eyes Wide Shut. Only appropriate, then, that the director of Happiness and Welcome To The Dollhouse should call in Glasgow's Belle and Sebastian to take the mickey out of soundtracks. Not the modern compilation of songs by different performers that never appear in the film. Think more of the days when Simon and Garfunkel earnestly interpreted The Graduate.

Guitarist Stevie Jackson explains in the sleeve notes that the band headed to New York with Dylan's Pat Garret And Billy The Kid soundtrack. Only six minutes of their bid to make like Ennio Morricone appear in the film, and much of that was written with specific instructions from Solondz.

But who needs to spread your wings when you've had such success with chamber pop: pastel melodies suggesting Nick Drake is jamming with the Velvet Underground on Burt Bacharach tunes? Storytelling is 18 tracks of melancholy, undergraduate instrumentals, six pop songs and film excerpts. F*** This S*** hints that some opposed lifting the harmonica from Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and Midnight Cowboy. Big John Shaft is mordant funk and Wandering Alone listless Latin. In the title I Don't Want To Play Football, the six Scots may have written their epitaph. 'Taking orders from a moron/Grabbing for the sweaty crotches/Getting hit by people I don't know/Sugar, I'd rather play a different game/Sugar, the girls are just as good as boys at playing.'

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