Get a dose of spring with a Belle & Sebastian dance party

Just look at the joy Belle & Sebastian brought to Prospect Park in 2013. Via Celebrate Brooklyn.

This is it, folks: the absolute worst time of year. The holidays are long gone, summer is way off and even the hope that you might get some desperate sad lonely person to take you home on Valentine’s Day has passed. You are desperately in need of a beacon of light at the end of this long, negative-wind-chill, slush flooded tunnel. You need a dose of spring. Failing any actual warm weather (though we might see a practically balmy 45 degrees this weekend!), try this recipe instead: take 1 part Scottish indie pop, mix in a heavy cup of twee, run it through a filter of sunny disposition and shake your booty vividly.

We’re recommending Saturday’s cheap Belle & Sebastian dance party from our friends at Feeling Gloomy as the perfect antidote for the seasonal blues. It’s cheap, it’s fun, and you can win prizes too. It beats spending your weekend sleeping the clock around. And, as explained below, it’s possible the band might actually control over the weather.

Feeling Gloomy takes place at Grand Victory in Williamsburg starting at 11, and the DJs will play “every Belle & Sebastian song you could ever conceive of dancing to,” plus lots of other B&S type stuff (aka danceable indiepop). Tix are just $4 in advance, $6 at the door. As for prizes, you can walk away with some sweet vinyl from the band if you win the The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Arm Wrestler contest.

“But Tim, I hear you saying, twiddling your arab strap between your fingers, “isn’t this event called Feeling Gloomy, and don’t some of those B&S songs make all you sad indie boys cray into your fashionable spectacles, not exactly spring-like thoughts?”

Oh you simple, frozen-brained fool. Let me spin you a tale of their weather-wizarding powers that go beyond songs that just scream sunshine. It was my birthday in 2010, and my good and true roommates had taken me to the Belle & Sebastian concert on the Williamsburg waterfront. But everyone in the crowd was in fear: major thunderstorms, high winds and heavy rains were in the forecast, and we all fretted the show would be canceled. Yet we attended, braced for the worst and, the storm, it never came.

That is, until the moment they played their last song and we headed for the gates, when the first rain drops hit our forehead before we even got onto Kent Avenue. Through sheer force of their vaguely Christian indie pop optimism, they had kept the storm at bay. As Gothamist’s John del Signore wrote after the show:

“We have good luck with the weather,” he explained, which reminded us of the band’s last NYC appearance at Battery Park, when an initial rain ceded to bright sunshine.

I also have it on good authority that one of the DJs for this evening met his girlfriend at that show. TIME IS A TWEE CIRCLE.