You can just imagine the conversation in the head
office of record company 'Rough Trade': 'Hey guys, four years between albums is
too long. I don't care if you're exhausted and you've travelled halfway round
the world and your old fans are exhausted too after travelling all that way
with you in their imagination. The new fans you got on your last two records
don't think like that. They want more product. They want an even more modern
production. They want you to record in a posh state-of-the-art Los Angeles
studio, not in some shed in Glasgow. They want guest appearances by current big
name superstars who'll be forgotten by next year. They want a TV special. They
want you to write about love!' The older Belle and Sebastian would have
resented any attempt to change who they are and what they stand for. The Belle
and Sebastian who worked for Jeepster would have shrugged their shoulders,
taken time out to film a music video that cost £54 and some digestives and got
on with what they were meant to be doing. And the old Belle and Sebastian did
nothing except write about love anyway - but the multi-layered idea of love, of
struggling to find it, retain it or simply learn not to prod and poke and to
exist in the moment in all its unfurling beauty. I know of no more romantic an
album than 'Tigermilk' - but it's an album about a series of hard-done by characters
dreaming of the future rather than actually experiencing it firsthand.
The difference is that, by 2010, Belle and Sebastian
are on shaky ground. The 'Belle' love story is over and while still playing a
part on this album is now one of many pieces of material being woven into the
style and feel of the album ('Read The Blessed Pages' being one final goodbye
song). The whole point of Belle and Sebastian i the early days was that story,
the idea that ordinary kids who didn't live in London and didn't have a voice
except through teeny-boppers and dancing pop stars could make you feel less
alone and isolated in your crumbling bedsit with your aspirations fading along
with the wallpaper you couldn't afford to change. Gradually, ever since Isobel Campbell left the
band in 2002, this isn't the same Belle and Sebastian anymore but a bona fide
pop band who had hit singles and did interviews (in this context the lines of some
of the songs on this album make a lot of sense: 'Will I Make it in the real
world?' 'I want the world to stop' 'I didn't see it coming!') Ironically this
is the first Belle and Sebastian album ever that isn't predominantly concerned
with 'love' - because the 'love' that Murdoch used to sing about is no more
with his muse out of the band and recording her own hit duet albums with gravelly
voiced Mark Lanegan (everything Stuart is not). The last two albums ('Dear
Catastrophe Waitress' and 'The Life Pursuit' have been attempts to work out where
to go next, whether there can be a life for Belle and Sebastian without 'Belle'
in the band and while it's been a bumpy and not altogether successful ride
someone somewhere seems to appreciate these new more-produced, more mainstream
quirky songs. What's ironic is that Belle and Sebastian have never been as
popular, the word of mouth about their albums growing with every release (both
the last album and this peaked at #8 after the band spent half their career
failing to make the charts at all) just at the point when they don't know who
they are anymore.
As well as being love stories the early Belle and
Sebastian records were also about identity to some extent, of finding your
place in a world so already over-stuffed with people drifting that there's no
automatic place for anyone anymore. That theme really comes to the fore on
'Write About Love', which even more than normal seems to ask 'who am I? And why
am I here?' On the one hand Stuart goes back to where it all began, getting in
touch with his sick-bed self between 1987 and 1994 who wrote that first batch
of great songs and had so much to say - using love in an abstract sense ('I
know a trick, forget that you are sick! Write about love, it can be in any
form!') 'I Want The World To Stop' seems to be crying out against the fact that
something somewhere went wrong and the narrator ended up someone he didn't want
to be. (Sarah's 'I Can See Your Future'
plays a similar trick, imagining going back to the narrator's past and whether
if he had the chance he'd do things a different way). 'Sunday's Pretty Icons'
is similarly 'lost' and confused, but is written in terms of 'a friend'. 'Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John' finally
comes up with some sort of definition of what a person in the song is, but the
line 'you're just part of this lifetime of dreaming' isn't exactly specific. The only Murdoch song on this record that has
any answers is 'The Ghost Of Rock School', Stuart's first overtly religious
song after some 20 off years of being a Christian convert (who was working as a
church caretaker when the band were originally formed) where it doesn't matter
what he does or why because the narrator sees 'God' (read 'love') everywhere he
goes. Stevie's song 'I'm Not Living In The Real World' is even more explicit:
the narrator is a man out of time, 'born on a Sunday' when everyone else was
born on a Monday, struggling to cope in a world of bills, jobs and material assets
rather than love and music, adamant that 'his' is the real world, not the one
around him which seems completely false. Sarah's 'other' song 'I Didn't See It
Coming' again sees the narrator finding identity only through the money she
doesn't have, flying on budget airlines to save money (although the closing
line 'we're following the right line' is about the one positive statement
across the whole album, as if offering comfort to the rest of the band).
This is, then, a band a little bit lost as to who
they are anymore without the old B and S story to hang on to - and even more
lost now that they're a million miles away from home geographically as well as
emotionally. The band are in L.A. at producer Tony Hoffer's urging - and if
ever a band should have stayed at home and surrounded themselves with fading
home-grown equipment rather than compete with the big boys its Belle and
Sebastian. This is plainly 'wrong' for anyone who bought an earlier LP by the
band specifically because they didn't sound as shiny and made-up as everyone
else (the whole point of B and S in the early days being about finding natural
beauty anywhere you looked, without the need for make-up, plastic surgery or shiny
productions). Alongside this the album was announced not with a small
self-mocking comment on the website, a fan-produced newsletter or a cryptic
photograph in a music mag that only fans would get but with a TV special. A TV
special! Exactly the sort of thing that killed off the careers of Johnny Cash
(who lost a lot of his credibility once he was seen singing with anyone who was
'dish of the day' - although admittedly he had a lot of great musicians on too,
including some AAA ones) and Lulu (who became ever more of an everywoman
'celebrity' afterwards rather than a singer with a truly natural gift of a
voice). Admittedly this was a very 'different' sort of TV special, complete
with an edgy sketch about record company ideas of commercialism (which made
even the similarly heavy-handed Paul Simon 1977 TV special run by his
'producer' Chevy Chase subtle) and some
question and answers from earnest fans that would have flown over the heads of
most people watching, but still: even used as subvertedly a TV special about a
band who always used to hate publicity just seems wrong.
Even Stuart's typically entertaining essay in the CD
booklet seems to make him appear as if he's rather be anywhere else but
recording with the band, rambling into his old English class being forced to
stay inside while studying a poem about the freedom of escaping the classroom
and dreaming his own dreams of 'not being in this room, but being out in the
open, roaming around this city [Los Angeles]'. In fact, I hated this record on
first hearings, as background music – the production really is awful and mires
the band in the 1980s like never before (their 1960s influences, alas, have
been growing more distant since the first records of the 1990s). In fact I can
more or less guarantee that the last time you heard so many sounds of the 1980s
in one place it really was the 1980s. It also says it all to me that guesting
non-voice background music singer Norah Jones fits as snugly into this record
as the-Janis-Joplin-of-the-1990s Monica Queen did on the band’s ‘Lazy Line
Painter Jane’, as the band turned more or less 180 degrees since their 1995
inception. However, I do prefer this production to what Hoffer did on 'The Life
Pursuit' - this time there are proper instruments along with the synthesisers,
little touches of Belle and Sebastian charming amateurism (the false start to
'I Want The World To Stop'), much more of Mick Cooke's brass and the band's
string section and the fact that this time the vocals aren't treated to quite
the same amount of technological trickery. Yes there's still a little too much
for my taste ('I Didn't See It Coming' would be a great song - if I could
actually hear what Sarah's singing behind all the glossiness), but there's been
a conscious reign in from 'The Life Pursuit's out-and-out commercialism to
something more down the middle road between 'old' and 'new' that's much more
suitable for a band whose 'lack' of a glossy sound used to be the whole point.
'Write About Love' doesn't quite get the mix as cleverly as Trevor Horn's production
on 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress', but this is undeniably a step in the right
direction, sounding - at times at least - like something the 'old' Belle and
Sebastian might have done.
What's more, the band seem to have suddenly
remembered their old fans. There are less out and out explorations of fantasy
on this record, less laundromats, funny little frogs and white collar boys on
the run from the law and more recognisable three-dimensional characters. Stuart
speaks in his opening essay about the 'hum of the cosmos' and that's pretty
much what was missing from the last album - it all happened in the writers'
heads rather than outside their windows. The title track is the most B and S
set of lyrics since at least 2001: a mind-numbing job that leads the narrator
to do all sorts of dumb things with dumb people as comic relief. 'I Want The
World To Stop' is back to the good/bad old days when B and S narrators poured
out their hearts while spending a wakeful night worrying over some big deal the
next day that might change their life. While the lyrics don't necessarily refer
to it, the music promo for 'Come On Sister' takes up this theme, showing a kind
of 'Trumpton' idea of Glasgow where Belle and Sebastian never happened and the
band all have 'proper' jobs (so convincingly are they that the video ends with
an outtake of someone genuinely entering 'Jacksons the Butchers and haggling
over the price of meat!) 'Sunday's Pretty Icons' also comes up with perhaps the
best summary of what Murdoch and co have been doing all these years singing
about the 'secret lives and loves' of their audience. While the packaging for
'The Life Pursuit' was pretty minimal by Belle and Sebastian's expansive (if
never expensive) tastes 'Write About
Love' goes back to having the sort of cover booklets that you can read like a
book rather than something to sing along to with the record, complete with three
essays (the most yet!) 'Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John', one of the
album's lesser moments, is the one exception to this, with Murdoch actively
telling us that they're the creation of his furtive imagination that is the one
song here that sounds like it belonged on the last LP.
If the early Belle and Sebastian albums were
stories, books designed to make fans feel less alone and as a sort of self-help
manual (see 'Tigermilk' which makes reference to the 'State I Am In' book written
in the first song - which isn't 'any help at all' by the last track!), then
'Write About Love' is a letter. An intimate letter from one friend to another,
keeping them abreast of what changes there in the band's life and wanting to
keep in touch. The front cover even has a model poised over some paper, pen in
hand (along with the title we're clearly meant to think of this as a 'love
letter', but as we've seen B and S don't actually sing about love much this
time around). In this context the way the CD booklet ends is classic B and S,
with the first mention of how fans can keep in touch since 'Fold Your Hands' nine
years before. For those who don't have booklet to hand (or whose pet tiger just
ate it) the full text isthe delightful: 'Write to us, or if you must send us
your band's latest music, or a home-made T-short, or whatever it is you're
into: we will endeavour to write back but admittedly the pile grows ever higher
and wobblier!' I have to say, though, I’m curious about the CD’s inner sleeve
which seems 'wrong' for this album somehow. We do see a book being read - for
the first time in 15 years. But it's a book of poetry, with 'a girl reading
'Keats' and a boy reading 'Yeats' - fitting for the title, maybe, but this is
the least 'poetic' Belle and Sebastian album yet (the lyrics do read more like
letters compared to days of old - even 'The Life Pursuit' sounded like a book
of nonsense poems when 'read' rather than heard). What's more, this personal
album is more like the kind of 'realism' poetry you get from Wordsworth or
Gerard Manley-Hopkins, not the flowery 'Keats' or 'surreal' Yeats (whose image
should be on a Moody Blues or Pink Floyd album, not a Belle and Sebastian one).
Is this a rare mistake? Did the band have less input into the packaging this
time around? Or am I missing the point? (again!)
Overall, then, this isn’t a vintage record by any
means – there are too many breathy ballads, fewer lyrical twists than we’re
used to hearing and a continuation of the hideous production styles of the
2000s which has seen our gloriously ramshackle uncaring band turned into Indie
popstars. In fact, I hated this record on first hearings, as background music –
the production really is awful and mires the band in the 1980s like never
before (their 1960s influences, alas, have been growing more distant since the
first records of the 1990s). There is, undeniably, a lot of filler - the days
when B and S delivered a completely or near-completely perfect record have been
gone a while now and some of this stuff is either awkwardly modern ('I Didn't
See It Coming'), poor ('Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John') or both ('I'm Not
Living In The Real World'). However 'Write About Love' is a step in the right direction and there are six songs that add a great deal to the B and S canon (three more than last time
out): the clever twist of 'Caluclating Bimbo', the urgent 'I Want The World To Stop', the catchy but deep title track, the
brilliantly uplifting 'Ghost Of Rockschool', the heartfelt 'Read The Blessed
Pages' and the best attempt yet at contemporary sounds 'I Can See Your Future'
(that sounds very Human League like - that's a compliment by the way!)
Yes the modern sound is still often supremely irritating
but compared to 'The Life Pursuit' there's more reward for our efforts in
digging beneath that surface. The lyrics are usually the highlights of a B and
S record and, although not classic, this album does have a few gems hiding
underneath all that surface noise. ‘Calculating Bimbo’ for instance, is a
gentlemanly song about a person trying to convince us he’s a gentleman, which
he succeeds with right up until he speaks the title words in the last sentence,
surrounded by the most wonderful lilting, typically fragile melody. ‘The Ghost
of Rockschool’ is nothing less than an essay exploring whether God really does
exist in the art of creation, refusing to believe until a glorious last happy
chorus sets us on our way just when we thought the song was over. Best of all,
‘Read The Blessed Pages’ is the most moving Murdoch song in years, the most
naked song yet about Isobel’s role in the band and how badly Murdoch needed her
inspiration to create any sort of band at all. The other songs can’t compete,
but when Murdoch’s up to this sort of level few writers can compete anyway. Talent
never disappears, it just gets covered up occasionally, and like many a B and S
record the treat is in the detail, the lyrical touches that make these songs
read less like accompaniments to music than as novels in their own right and
the odd arranging trick that goes in directions no other band would dare to try
– or think up. The more I hear this record properly, by concentrating on it for
this review, the more I like it. In fact I’d go so far as to say this album is
the first B and S record to trounce its predecessor, the solid but uninspiring
‘Life Pursuit’ of 2006, as the band has been suffering a gradual decline bit by
bit since releasing the almost-perfect ‘Tigermilk’ in 1995. There are touches
of greatness here and one or two songs to treasure. And to be fair, I’m just
grateful to have the band still around at all. There’s been a record four year
gap between albums, punctuated only by philosophical solo records, and it
really did look as if the B and S story was over – even at half capacity I’m oh
so pleased to have them back and I can even forgive them the oh so obvious (in
2010- she's rather disappeared since this review was written!) presence of
Norah Jones for that.
The
Songs:
Opener ‘I Didn’t See It Coming’ isn’t the best place to start, however.
For this album’s two starting tracks the nasty production values are turned to
the max and for B and S these lyrics are more kindergarten than Keats. Those of
you who’ve read my forum will know that I consider Sarah Martin the unsung
heroine of the band and that her track ‘Family Tree’ is currently sitting top
of my ‘gold song award’ lists. But this song – one of only two by her on the
album again, alas – is her worst song yet. The tune sounds suspiciously close
to something else, the uncharacteristically noisy drumming gets in the way and
the quagmire of 1980s synthesisers is painful to the ears. If you read this
song, though, rather than read it, it does have a sort of quiet charm: in the
context of the Coalition’s so-called ‘credit crunch’ these lyrics are quite
moving - forced to take the train instead of the more expensive plane means
that ‘I can see the world from a different side’ and the comment that money
makes the wheels’ go round is met with the rejoinder ‘forget about it, honey’.
There’s also perhaps the best rhyme of the whole record: ‘we’ve been going
trans-continental – got no car, we just take a rental’. The narrator appears to
be hit hard by financial difficulties – she repeats over and over that she
‘didn’t see it coming’ and – from lyrics alone – we should be really moved by
this song. The tune, alas, is not as strong as the words though and the
horrible production (perhaps equating this credit crunch period with the riots
of the 1980s) makes a promising song sound awful.
‘Come On
Sister’
is slightly better, thanks to a ridiculously catchy riff played on keyboards
and guitar – in fact the fiery guitar part here is the best on a B and S record
since ‘Tigermilk’, driving the song forward rather than being merely a wash of
colour as it has recently. Sadly, though, this is Murdoch’s weakest song on the
record, a simple song about being awake in the middle of the night and trying
to forget his recent heartbreak. For all the song’ s attempt at forced jollity,
though, the song sounds forced – the sharp angular melody and the bittersweet
lyrics really aren’t a good match for each other and the idea has been done
before many times by other bands. Murdoch, too, sounds uncomfortable singing
the lead – he’s doing his best to sound upbeat but it’s clear the lyrics don’t
fit the mood, even though some of the lines are as clever as anything else he’s
ever written (‘it does me no good to keep looking ahead to your future
adoration’, for instance, that no other band would dream of using and yet it
says everything about the narrator’s confused love life here). Even when meant
ironically, though, it’s sad to hear a band of B and S’ talent reduced to
singing a chorus of ‘Saying Ho! Saying Yo!’ Not a good start to the record.
‘Calculating
Bimbo’
is much better and one of the two highlights on the record for me. Murdoch’s
melody is so sad and his words so full of regret and hurt that it’s amazing he
doesn’t break down singing the lead. The production also works much better
here, putting Murdoch’s lead and Martin and Stevie Jackson’s sensitive
harmonies centre stage with only a ripple of synths rather than a sea. As
discussed, the lyrics to this song are clever indeed, a sort of distillation of
all of Murdoch’s past songs for Campbell, even mimicking ‘Dog On Wheels’ at the
start with lines about ‘you mistook for being lazy – i was just being lazy’
mirroring the earlier ‘when I was a boy I was confounded by you – now I’m still
a boy I am indebted to you’. The narrator thinks that on balance he’s happy
that he had the relationship at all, even if it ended badly and in a moving
line his partner has run away from his narrow world to have a ‘four floor view’
that takes in much more (Campbell sacrificed her supporting role in the band to
undertake a series of successful duet albums with Mark Lanegan, giving her much
more kudos from reviewers than she ever had while in the band). For the most
part this is a beautiful song, with Murdoch ruminating where things went wrong,
agreeing not to do them again and still aching for the old connection they used
to share (even after the split it’s the narrator not his partner’s new lover
whose on the phone in the middle of the night trying to put things right, ‘I’m
your captain for the long haul’). Then comes that sudden twist of bitterness at
the end, calling the lover a ‘calculating bimbo, I wish you’d let the past go’,
even though the narrator has being doing nothing else for the whole of the song.
Many past B and S songs pull off the same trick of the
did-they-really-just-say-that? line stuck at the end of some pristine gorgeous
ballad, but this song is more successful than most, really catching the
listener by surprise and giving vent to all the bitterness that has been
building up the whole song despite the narrator’s best intentions. Even better
is the unexpected shift to the minor chord in the middle of the song (the verse
beginning ‘With lots of time, a notebook full...’) as the narrator finally
gives way to his feelings and begins to look backwards not forwards as he tries
so hard to do. Lovely, moving and thoughtful, with unexpected twists and turns,
this is one of two songs from the album that represent the best B and S work
since the ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ album of 2005.
‘I Want The
World To Stop’ is a less involved, more poppy take on the same
subject, with the narrator trapped in his bedsit in ‘sheets of milky winter
disorder’, wondering where things have gone wrong. Like some B and S songs of
old, this song starts off simple and becomes more and more unstable, verse by
verse, as the narrator’s life veers more and more out of control. The end
effect isn’t quite as convincing as ‘Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie, perhaps the
best example of that trick, but it still works well – especially after the
juxtaposition of the last track. Mick Cooke’s bleary-eyed trumpet arrangement
is spot-on, as is the call-and-answer section from an electronically treated
Sarah and Stevie and the tune is a typically adventurous Murdoch one that
appears to be serene and calm on the surface but is fighting for breath
underneath it all. There’s an intriguing sub-plot, too, about the fickleness of
fame – as you may recall if you’re reading these reviews in order B and S were
such a famous cult band in 1998 that a Warner Brothers executive flew all the
way from America to promise them lots of money and make them stars. B and S
didn’t even bother turning up en masse to the meeting and told him to go home.
Things have changed though, starting with the surprisingly good ‘Dear
Catastrophe Waitress’ album, making the B and S sound much clearer, easily
digestible and more akin to what’s in the pop market. Murdoch seems to be
regretting the decision here, though: ‘tinseltown has followed me...’, a place
where ‘as the sun hangs low the girls don’t care, as they paint themselves at
dusk’, a classic Murdoch image of desolation. In the next verse, too, workers
move up to the suburbs, all angling to be rich and powerful, with Murdoch
already aware that the happiness they seek can’t be found just through money
and success alone and leave him offering up a ‘prayer for every car’ he passes.
For all this fine imagery, though, the lyrics to this song aren’t as strong as
others on this album – although the last verse, with the narrator trying to
convince himself not to write to his lover as he used to at a certain time
every day, is quite moving - and this
track repeat the chorus too many times for comfort in the end.
‘Little Lou,
Ugly Jack, Prophet John’ is another Murdoch-by-numbers ballad
which tries hard but doesn’t really come off – mainly, it has to be said,
because of the guest star. Norah Jones is one of those singers who came to fame
in the 1990s despite not playing an instrument or doing much writing or having
more than an average voice. I could name plenty more from the same era who all
have the same sort of drippy, tranquil voices which are radio-friendly and
pleasant but don’t excite or enthuse or energise or entertain the way singers
should. Admittedly, I’d much rather Murdoch record with Norah than, say, The
Spice Girls, as at least she can sing a bit and her vocals work with Murdoch’s
breathy baritone surprisingly well. But the two come from separate worlds and
it’s a waste of a good, revealing song having to compensate for Norah’s
workmanship vocals which may be technically better than Murdoch’s but can’t
convey the same sense of waste and loss. The tune is another of those from this
record that sound recycled from something that already exists (though I can’t
quite put my finger on what) and the lyrics are again quite simple for B and S,
although still with flashes of brilliance such as the comment to the parting
lover that ‘you’re just part of this lifetime of dreaming’. I’d have loved to
have heard the demo version of this track in fact, with Murdoch vulnerable and
alone, trying his best to shrug off the song’s deepest sentiments and pretend
everything is OK – trying to sound like Norah, in fact. But having her there just
makes this song sound false, like a reject from one of those 1990s albums by
breathy singers in fact. In case you’re wondering the curious title refers to
three characters the narrator is desperately trying to invent, to cover up the
fact that this song is more real and honest than normal and all but writing
itself despite Murdoch’s best attempts.
The title track 'Write About Love' is another noisy pop song that
tries to look at the act of song-writing more dispassionately. In a close
mirror of Paul Simon’s ‘Song About The Moon’ (see review no 85), this is
Murdoch’s tip of the week to budding songwriters: if you get writer’s block,
write about love because it’s something everybody feels at some point in their
lives and can relate to (which is basically what Paul Simon was saying anyway).
Ironically, though, this song is arguably less about love than any of Murdoch’s
other tracks on this album, being a sterling attempt at writing a catchy pop
song. ‘About Love’ is similar to ‘Legal Man’ in the way it features more hooks
than a pair of curtains and an innocence and delight, even though the lyrics
are again quite bitter. The narrator is stuck in a dead end job, watching the
hours tick slowly round, only enjoying escape when he goes up to the office’s
roof gardens to dream about the world below. Sarah Martin is on terrific form
in the nagging harmonies and B and S actually sound like a band again, rather
than just Murdoch’s backing band, making this one of the more successful
recordings on the album. I’m confused as to how the verses relate to one
another, though: are there two narrators in this song, one stuck in an office
and the other being a poet? I’m still moved by the closing lines about ‘seeing
the dreams through the windows and trees of your living room’, however, one of
the best lines on the album. Confusing, but good. You can't hear her too well,
sadly, but according to the sleevenotes that's actress Carey Mulligan (one of
Hollywood's biggest 'new' stars of the 2010s, who like all the best actresses
started her career on Dr Who) singing along on the chorus - reading around, no
one seems to be quite sure why she's there, including the band.
Alas, Jackson’s contribution ‘I’m Not Living In The Real
World’ isn’t as successful as his past tracks for the band. Again, it’s the arrangement and production
that are to blame: there’s a so-so song at work here about the blurred lines
between fantasy and reality, but it’s lost in a mess of heavy drums, echoey
vocals that make it hard to hear the words and some more appearances by that
irritating 80s synth. There’s a also a twee key change in the middle of the
song that strains the already annoying riff to breaking point, causing the
vocalists’ vocals to crack. The opening lines of the song seem to link back to
the last track, with their comments about how for those born on the supposedly ‘artistic’
day of ‘Sunday’ no day will ever be poetic or artistic enough by comparison and
that ‘every day will be Monday’ (in case you’re wondering, yes I was born on a
Sunday – something tells me Jackson was too). There’s a fun autobiographical
track bat work here, with the narrator too fragile to cope with the noisy mess
of the modern world (put into sound rather too convincingly by the horrid
production) and wandering while still at school if he’ll ever ‘make it in the
real world’. By the close he’s taken his exams, is on a ‘mickey mouse’ college
course and stacking shelves part-time, still asking himself the same question,
‘holding back the real world’. Had the band given this song a different
arrangement and made it a bit longer then this short sketch of a song might
have been one of the album highlights – but alas here it sounds unfinished,
erratic and twee.
‘The Ghost Of
Rockschool’ has much more of the traditional B and S sound and
may well be trying to fool us into thinking it’s just another typical B and S
song when, actually, it’s one of Murdoch’s most revealing songs to date. The
narrator begins the first part of the song dreaming, seeing how wonderful the
world could be in his dreams and then watching the image fades as he wakes up
and gets on with the business of being alive. This is a man on auto-pilot, with
a ‘demon’ waiting at his garden gate to distract him with ideas of jobs and
business that are actually not what he should be doing with his life at all,
not with a world full of poetry, art and the act of creation. A figure –
presumably Campbell again – is in her ivory tower, apart from the real world
and everything the narrator wants in his life (although it may be an idealised
image he knows he’ll never meet in real life). But even though the narrator
considers her a ‘temptation’ he should avoid, the very thought of her causes
his life to get out the doldrums and the song enters a really beautiful coda.
This time the idea that ‘I’ve seen God in the sun, I’ve seen God in the street’
is no longer a wondrous image he only sees in his dreams but in the real world,
with her ‘heaven in her reflection’. This is a gorgeous piece of song-writing,
right up there with Murdoch’s best and a characteristic bit of short-term loss
and long-term optimism from a band that excels in poetic, subtle songs like
these. The arrangement isn’t quite up to the song, though, sounding a bit too
much like B and S by numbers, although to be frank I’d rather hear the band
sticking to a tried and tested formula than the monstrosity of the early parts
of the record. The tune is also quite simplistic, even for this record,
although arguably that’s what this song about finding inspiration in even the
most mundane of places needs most.
‘Read
The Blessed Pages’ is more revealing still. A
beautiful haunting breathy ballad, this is the barest B and S song we’ve had
since the demos that used to be sent out to the world as B-sides and EP tracks.
Murdoch sings alone with just his guitar for the most part, until the band’s
harmonies and – irritatingly – a panpipe kick in near to the end of the song,
and the emphasis this places on the lyrics makes this probably the highlight of
the whole record. This song is effectively a history of the band from inception
to the present, though typically poetic rather than a true slab of
autobiography a la Cat Stevens’ career overview ‘I Never Wanted To Be A Star’
or The Kinks’ ‘The Road’. The narrator is back again in a ‘small town’, which
reminds him of where he used to live and what he used to be like, triggering
off a rambling monologue about his influences and memories which is highly
touching. Belle and Sebastian have stayed together so many years because of
‘love and pain and sorrow’ we are told in the opening line, before Murdoch
tells us of a ‘soul mate, whispering in my ear’ which is almost definitely
Campbell. There’s another figure, too, who used to call up about the band in
the middle of the night but has long ago stopped calling. I’m tempted to see
this as Stuart David, the other member to have left the band during its 16
years together, who contributed the spacey, electronic collage sections to B
and S records. If so, the line about him ‘calling out in the crowd’, making a
connection with Murdoch that helps start him on a journey, is really moving for
fans of this band.We also hear a bit of Murdoch, the songwriter, at work,
‘pulling songs from thin air, pulling songs from bridges’ as he keeps an eye on
the world and its troubles. ‘Making plastic records of our history’ is a
another memorable line which is almost the band’s theme song, recording moments
in time like an aural diary and – while you always have to do a bit of digging
– it is true that Murdoch has always worn his heart on his sleeve more than
most songwriters, growing up album by album before our ears. He also bids his
muse a fond farewell in the last two verses, admitting that their time together
is over and that he too can move on to new directions, with the ‘pain in my
memory a cherished story’ that he will look back on in the future as he does
now with days gone by. Murdoch ends by telling someone (presumably Campbell)
that ‘ever will I love you’ and ‘did I do my
best, dear?’ in his 16 years spreading music to the world. Now, reading this
cold on paper that probably sounds excruciatingly self-indulgent, but if you’re
a fan who’ve followed this band through thick and thin and have only ever
mentioned themselves in two songs before (‘Seymour Stein’ and ‘Belle and
Sebastian’ itself) then this is a moving moment indeed. I could have done
without the irritating panpipes and I’d have loved for the melody of this song
to have been as inventive and melodic as the words, but this is still a
terribly strong song and as a fan you have to answer, yes Sebastian, you truly
did do your best and we’re oh so grateful you did. Play this song back to back
with the idealistic ‘Belle and Sebastian’ track from the ‘Push The Barman’ EP
collection and it’s hard not to shed a tear, the early beginning to the pair’s
relationship, which seems to end here.
From here on in the record sinks to the
level of the opening pair of songs. ‘I Can See Your Future’ is Sarah Martin’s other song on the
album and its only marginally better than her first. Mick Cooke’s trumpet
section bleat as loudly as ever, the guitars chime nicely and the lyrics are
intriguing, if a bit impenetrable. Alas, though, the melody of this song seems
only the minutest about of DNA apart from 2002’s ‘Storyteller’ song (from the
film soundtrack of the same name) with an a capella/string section in the
middle which rates as the lowest point of the whole record, having lost the
tune, any momentum the song has built up and any interest there has been in the
lyrics. Lyrically this is another song about the past, with the narrator seeing
an old friend and trying to remember how their friendship started and the
overwhelming feeling she felt the first time she realised that she was not
alone in the world and that other people were as lost and directionless as she
was. I’m tempted after the last track to see this as Sarah’s reaction to
Stuart’s song and her memories of joining the band, but that may well be an
interpretation too far and its simply a quirk of the record that the two songs
are here together. However, her rejoinders to her partner ‘don’t leave me
behind’ do sound like a band being abandoned for a solo record?!...Whatever the
message behind the song, its one of those tracks that kind of 50/50 works
really well and 50/50 doesn’t work at all. The melody is nothing special, the
string section is excruciating and the backing is right back in a 1980s groove
I could have done without. But some of these lyrics are clever and Sarah’s
delivery of them is as great as ever – I keep going on about Murdoch’s
wise-beyond-his-time presence on these records but Sarah is the unsung heroine
of the band, the perfect poppier foil to Murdoch’s more wistful songs.
Final song ‘Sunday’s Pretty Icons’ is a curious place
to end the album – the three vocalists are all singing out of their normal
range which gives this song quite a sinister feel and the lyrics deal with a
search for perfection which the narrator(s) know they will never achieve. This
song is similar in feel to Badfinger’s song ‘Perfection’ and are similarly
pessimistic in their acknowledgement that even their best ideas will come to
naught. Alas, Murdoch has already come up with possibly the best song on that
theme with ‘If She Wants Me’, a track from 2005’s ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’,
which has the sensible coda that, on reflection, the narrator would rather give
up trying and spend his time playing with his best friend instead. Alas,
there’s no such twist in the tale on this rather pedestrian and uninvolving
track, which ends the song on a bed of 1980s synths and a curious fade which
seems to come from nowhere, in the middle of a keyboard solo. Like much of the
album, it’s infuriating because there is a good song lying at the bottom of
this sea of noise, having read the lyric sheet, with classic lines about
passing time like ‘whiskey from the year you were born tastes like kidnap and
ransom and exile’, your memories of how you wanted to be in the future a prison
because of what you are today. ‘Sunday’ isn’t really an enjoyable song,
admirable though the lyrics are, and it leaves a curious taste in the mouth once
the album has ended. We’re used to curious goodbyes from Belle and Sebastian,
from Judy’s dream about wild horses through to a whole song based on the
‘Mornington Crescent’ game from the radio four comedy ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A
Clue’, but never has there been one as uninvolving and cold as this one.
So that’s that. A pretty bad record
overall, then, but with two or three truly delightful moments that still give
me hope for the future of this much-loved band, if only they can ditch the
synthesisers, and I still miss the ramshackle Belle and Sebastian of old even
if their new direction does, at times, flower into something wondrous.
Individual moments are as strong as ever – and Murdoch’s songwriting hasn’t
been this revealing about his relationships for a long time – but there’s also
something tired about this album, which is surprising for a band that’s been
four years away (and unlike Dire Straits or Pink Floyd who always do take a
long time between albums, B and S were making a record every 10 months at one
stage and this is double the gap of any we’ve had before now). For all our
insights within the lyrics, perhaps the most revealing thing of all is
Murdoch’s sleevenotes where he admits that returning to the studio ‘is not what
I want to do, but what I have to do’ – his first solo album of 2009 didn’t hang
around long enough for even me to pick up a copy so was this band album simply
a substitute for a Murdoch album that didn’t make it? The revealingness of the
lyrics suggests it and yet if anything there are too many band performances on
this record, without the humble simplicity of Murdoch on his own for a song or
two as before. Jackson and Martin also sound strangely muted, as if their
contributions have been added at the last minute even though their songs have
been the highlights of the last couple of B and S records, by and large. It’s
worth emphasising again, though, that this record really isn’t all that bad on
its own terms and at least there are tracks that stand out amongst the crowd
this time around, unlike 2006’s ‘Life Pursuit’ which sounded pretty much all
the same. But perhaps next time – if there is a next time – Belle and Sebastian
should stop writing about love and getting back to what they do best –
intelligent, thoughtful songs played with a poetic passion and an observant eye
that makes even their humblest of characters sound like a hero in waiting.
A Now Complete Link Of Belle and Sebastian Articles Available
To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
'God Help The Girl' (Stuart Murdoch Film) (2014) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/belle-and-sebastianstuart-murdoch-god.html
Girls In Peace Time Just Want To Dance (2015) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/belle-and-sebastian-girls-in-peacetime.html
Belle and Sebastian: Existing TV Clips http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/belle-and-sebastian-existing-tv-clips.html
Belle and Sebastian: 12 Unreleased Songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/belle-and-sebastian-12-unreleased-songs.html
Belle and Sebastian: Non-Album Songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/belle-and-sebastian-non-album_29.html
Belle and Sebastian: Solo/Live/Compilation/Rarities
Albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/belle-and-sebastian-assorted.html
Essay: B and S Talkin’
‘Bout My Generation https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/belle-and-sebastian-essay-talking-bout.html
Five Landmark Concerts and
Three Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/belle-and-sebastian-five-landmark.html
