| Music Cd's Bestsellers | Lazy Line Painter Jane Cd

The three four-song EPs that Belle and Sebastian released on their own Jeepster label in 1997 are regarded by many fans to be their most enjoyable artifacts, and it's hard to argue. Like a Peel session, there is a looser feel to these recordings; they're less perfectionist than the proper albums they bookend (Tigermilk and Sinister). And this is their charm: Stuart Murdoch and friends augment their preciously fey, orchestral pop with cross-genre elements and two great songs with spoken word on top that remind one of similar experiments conducted by the Mekons in the mid-'80s. The first EP includes an early, pre-Tigermilk demo of "Dog on Wheels," a delicious ditty that sounds like Nick Drake and Burt Bacharach working out a song in a practice space somewhere in Edinburgh. The choice to issue the music in facsimile editions--the only thing new is a piece of cardboard--rather than the single disc onto which they would easily fit seems a tad suspect. But these EPs do capture an unsteady group with great influences and good ideas in the act of transcending that to become one of the 1990s' smartest, most enjoyably decadent pop acts.

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