Best tunes of 2003: #9 Belle & Sebastian “Dear catastrophe waitress”

“Dear. Catastrophe. Waitress.”

Back when I first moved to Ottawa, I was employed at a call center taking calls for a utility company that I will not name here. It was unionized and pretty good pay and I was often able to pick up extra shifts to pay down my student debt. And if they hadn’t closed up shop in 2006, I might even still be working there today.

My coworkers were good people and management understood that taking calls was a tough job so they were often looking for ways to improve office morale. They held plenty of social events, encouraged fun, theme days in the office, and offered prizes for keeping call times low, call quality high, and for perfect attendance. While I was rarely in the top for call times and my quality was middling at best, I never missed work days, which meant collecting a hundred dollar gift card at the store of my choice for perfect attendance once a year. Of course, my store of choice back then tended to be HMV Canada, which allowed me to score a handful of CDs. The second year I got my gift card, my trove of purchases included the newly released sixth album by Belle and Sebastian, “Dear Catastrophe Waitress”.

I had been a fan of the Glaswegian twee pop collective for a few years by then, having been introduced to them by a friend in my final year of university. I had taken quickly to their first three albums, all of which had been released in just as quick a succession in the last few years of the 90s. And it was really on the backs of those that I bought the compact disc. I hadn’t taken as hastily to their fourth record, “Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant”, though I’ve since grown to appreciate it, and the same went for 2002’s “Storytelling”, which was sort of the soundtrack to the 2001 Todd Solondz film of the same name*. Happily, I found “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” a complete shift in gears and a revitalization of Belle and Sebastian’s sound. There was tons to like and pick through and I spent a lot of time doing so**.

“I’m sorry that you seem to have the weight of the world over you
I cherish your smile
There’s a word of peace on your lips
Say it, and with tenderness I’ll cherish”

“Dear Catastrophe Waitress” is now one of my favourite albums by Belle and Sebastian and the title track is easily my favourite on the album. Track two is just over two minutes in length but it’s a frenetic two minutes. Like an ill run, short-staffed restaurant at lunch time, slammed by ornery and ignorant tourists. After two repetitions of the title, frontman Stuart Murdoch launches hard into an ode to the under-appreciated waitress. Meanwhile, the drums are non-stop and the symphony of horns and strings are all ramped up in keeping up, a cacophony of cartoon sounds, the coyote and roadrunner conspiring together.

By the end, we are all left breathless and sad. But ready to start it all over again.

*Which I also didn’t really like and unlike the previous album, I still don’t really like this one.

**I even picked up a novel from the library by Brendan Halpin, an author I had never heard of, a few years after the album’s release, simply because it borrowed the album’s title for its own. (It was an enjoyable read.)

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.