Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit (2006)

‘We’ve made some pretty messy records’, says Stuart Murdoch, ringleader of the cirque du soleil that is Belle and Sebastian, on 2003’s ‘Fans Only’ DVD. This comes a minute after a mission statement of sorts, as Murdoch grasps for the words to describe why he started the band: a desire to ‘make the most tuneful, lush sounding records imaginable’. For ten years now, while throwing out more tuneful, catchier songs than anyone else, the band has also been edging along the taut tightrope from messy to lush. Their early records are laden with lisping voices, faint strings, tinny brass and background fuzz. In short, they sound like precious lost recordings from the early seventies, with careworn dents and scratches that fall just to the charming side of shambolic: Murdoch’s voice breaking on the demo version of ‘The State I Am In’, or unzipping his cardigan during the intro to ‘Expectations’. Albums number three and four moved toward lush, layered pop, taking in new instruments and influences: the bagpipes on ‘Sleep The Clock Around’, the crisp harpsichord on ‘The Model’, and the Northern Soul vibe of ‘Dirty Dream #2’. The giant step came in 2000, with the single ‘Legal Man’. Advertised by the band as, ‘like Dirty Dream #2, but dirtier’, its congas, organ, sitar and dirty big kick-off riff matched against daft lyrical innuendo, a snappy chorus and, crucially, beefed up production, so that ‘Legal Man’ sounded more like a chart record than anything the band had ever done. It made the top twenty, and landed them on Top Of The Pops. It was no flash in the pan, either. Their next single, ‘Jonathan David’ followed in a similar vein, all high tempo and cheesy organ, and their last album, 2003’s ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ showed a change from the chamber music of yore, with stuff like ‘Step Into My Office Baby’ (more innuendo) and ‘I’m a Cuckoo’ (more big riffs). Now we get ‘The Life Pursuit’, six fine albums in (not counting the collections of EP’s and singles or the half-baked soundtrack), and there may be no going back; the tightrope has been crossed.

We arrive at a classroom. There is a girl daydreaming her worries away. This is what you might call Belle and Sebastian playing on their home turf, with a biblical lesson and a wink to androgyny to boot. Despite the poppy songwriting style and delivery, there is a familiar ring to the line-up of props and characters throughout the album. There are, as you can expect on their records, kids with troubles at home. There are punks, tea and gin, religion, kinky s*x and a launderette. Again, there are a few songs stylised after other bands (‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ dropped a nod to Thin Lizzy and The Clash amongst others) with some very 80’s sounds on the excellent ‘We Are The Sleepyheads’ and on ‘Song For Sunshine’ with its Cocteau Twins pastiche of a chorus. And, as usual, they’ve lodged the odd swear word to keep you on your toes, especially where an expletive is buried in a benign, milky ditty, like a landmine in a meadow.

Another thing you can always count is for Belle and Sebastian (or more accurately, their songs’ protagonists) to be is refreshingly uncool - at times provincial or mawkish or just plain tripped up by puberty. On ‘The Blues Are Still Blue’, Murdoch is still acting the gauche schoolkid (‘I got a letter from my mamma which my stoopid dog has ate’) but the song is dressed up in funky threads, and moves with a swagger and confidence in a way it could gatecrash David Bowie’s ‘Hunky Dory’ and get away with it. You sense the band is having more fun and taking chances. It’s a marked change for Murdoch to sing ‘I left my lady at the launderette’ - he’d never have called his girl his ‘lady’ before, it would have been a hint at a liaison with a wallflower named Jean or Jane or Mary Jo. Now he’s Sly Stone, and somehow his girl is doing his washing.

‘The Blues Are Still Blue’ is released as a single this week, and it would be my first pick as a single from the album, with its clever, simple, singable chorus and ‘proper’ guitar solo. There are plenty of contenders, though; ‘The Life Pursuit’ plays like a singles collected and most of the songs wouldn’t sound out of place on morning radio. Even the chorus-less ‘Another Sunny Day’ could qualify by virtue of its relentless pep, as could ‘For The Price Of a Cup Of Tea’, which shows that as their song titles approach self-parody, they still play it for kicks with the ‘If She Wants Me’ style skank, and the quintessential Belle and Sebastian lyric, unhip but fun, ‘For the price of a cup of tea, you’d get a line of coke’.

‘Funny Little Frog’, the single which warmed us all for the winter, and the other similarly chirpy and danceable songs are accessible and immediate, but after a few spins, we will call for something more substantial past all the froth. The straight narratives of ‘Sukie in the Graveyard’ and ‘White Collar Boy’ lack the poetic fractured lyrics of, say, ‘Dress Up In You’, one of the more traditional Belle and Sebastian tunes here, with its trumpets and milquetoast ‘Nice Day For a Sulk’ bob. Despite the abundance of chipper chart material on this album, their forté remains bittersweet songs, like the achingly pretty ‘To Be Myself Completely’ and its expressive violin melody, or like ‘Mornington Crescent’ which brings the album to a stirring close, with a sweet guitar and piano break, around which Murdoch drops vignettes suffused with guilt over a laid-back Sunday morning beat, sketching a scene with effortless turn of phrase, alert to everyday details and moments of anticipation, drawing anxiety out of a pregnant pause.

On Belle and Sebastian’s 1999 EP ‘This Is Just a Modern Rock Song’ (notable for the stunning ‘Slow Graffiti’), Murdoch sung on the muddy lead track, ‘we’re not terrific but we’re competent’. It was an excellent joke, as the truth was, of course, the other way around. For better or worse though, it now looks as if cold competency has crept up on the band, and we’re lumped with it. We should have seen it coming, though. Murdoch gave us another clue on ‘Fans Only’, ‘‘You look at each other and you think, come on, let’s make a fabulous sounding record this time. Let’s make a record that’s as good as, y’know, ‘Make Me Smile’ by Cockney Rebel or ‘Marquee Moon’ by Television’. This is it.

Rating: 8/10

Tony Kelleher
03.04.2006


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