The Short Version (more about the album and less about me):
Belle and Sebastian’s new album “The Life Pursuit” is a logical step for the ensemble, as its accomplished cast thickens the candy coat of their signature sound; one that seems to grow tighter with each release and more enjoyable with each listen. It’s yet another B&S product well worth a 15 dollars investment and is rightly recommended for:
I) those who enjoyed Dear Catastrophe Waitress and long for more of Stuart Murdoch’s cleverly progressive lyrics,
and
II) those who find Murdoch’s verse to be over-thought and self-indulgent and don’t enjoy Dear Catastrophe Waitress, but do enjoy both
a) the art of informed complaining
and
b) the intriguing cover art of B&S releases.
The Long Version (less about the album and more about me –and Oprah, [but still essentially about the album, as the parts concerning she and I, those digressive and occasionally incriminating, tend to do so in a frame that pertains to B&S or music in some way, shape or form {though often imperceptibly so.}]):
I fall asleep in cars; sometimes as a passenger; sometimes as a driver. At times I've awoken on early mornings after late nights when jostled gently by a sun-burned friend after safely arriving at our destination in the wasteland of Northern New Jersey. At other times, I've awoken post-accident when jostled violently by a wind-burned police officer after sleepily leveling a fire hydrant in the wasteland of a posh Manhattan-suburbia and forcing a bloated, red-faced fireman to truly earn his overtime wage by wadding across the flooded lawn of an over-priced condo complex in search of my license plate and the bumper that once cased it. What’s important is that you wake up, right? I believe so.
I also believe that my most memorable car-waking moment came next to the diner (the same in which, a month earlier, my girlfriend had broken up with me as I ate my first bison-burger and sat sad-eyed and dull-tongued above my double-fried curly fries, still unaware that in a mere month’s time I'd learn, through the contrast brought about by exceptional music, that such in-fashion foods and females are far less memorable and important than waking up to a perfect song.)
Nodding in and out of sleep as we entered the dim-lit parking lot of that notoriously foul 24 hour diner, sprawled across the cluttered backseat of a car driven by an energetic home-schooled Jew-for-Jesus named Daniel Morris Jacobs, I heard Belle and Sebastian for the first time, waking to "Tigermilk" shortly after Dan jumped a short curb with his bald tires (directly in front of a bald man, who dropped a tooth pick from his mouth while screaming, “You nearly hit me, causing me, in the process, to drop my corned beef sandwich on the ground, as it was packed ineloquently in a white paper bag, what with most 24-hour diners lacking the know-how, supplies and/or motivation to package left-overs in foil-formed swans! You owe me a sandwich!” I’m paraphrasing and embellishing, of course. I don’t remember his exact words or if he had corned beef or pastrami. All I know is that we almost hit him, he called the cops, and I spent three months in prison while Dan was killed in a train accident soon there after. Seriously, ask Oprah.) I thought I was dreaming, the music was perfect, the bald man was bounding about hysterically, and I'd long suspected that perfection and joy are graces most often identified in dreams.
So, I woke to B&S’s "I Don't Love Anyone"- the best harmonized toungue-in-cheek isolationist anthem to laugh and cry to simultaneously since S&G’s "I am a Rock.” And the car was a rusted 1989 Mazda 626 and the point is: we remember songs because songs change lives as women and beef-substitutes and train accidents can not. I wouldn't recognize that ex-girlfriend if I floated by the window of her second floor bedroom behind the wheel of a dilapidated Dodge on both a hydrant-forged wave of water and a handful of OTC energy-pills that take too long to kick in and cause palpitations. All I’ll remember of the affair is that I don't love anyone-
Since that waking diner day, I’ve attempted to convince nearly everyone I’ve come in contact with both that home-schooling promotes independent thought and that Belle and Sebastian are they best imported band since The Smiths. At traffic stops, I’ve lectured lecturing policeman about Stuart’s distinct phrasing and lyrical literariness. Annunciating poorly around that clingy spit-siphoning-tube, I’ve preached to drilling Russian dentists about the uniqueness the ensemble exhibits in managing to merge the earnest pop sensibilities of Jan and Dean, the confident rhythm and vision of Wilson and Love, the flexible foresight and brilliant evolutionary progression of Lennon and McCartney and the sardonic tempo vs. message contrast of Morrissey and Marr. I’ve bored girlfriends with diatribes about the lingering resistance self-wounding American’s have ignorantly erected towards European pop. And upon hearing that they unknowingly named their cats after this, my favorite band, I interrupted my favorite aunt and uncle mid-sentence to quiz them on the Scottish group and the French children’s book that inspired their moniker, recommended a dozen or so songs that would act as an apt introduction to the former, and expressed my opinion that coincidence, even above will, purposeful intervention and fate, is the force that holds the greatest influence over the eventual shaping of our short lives. I bought albums from artists who were said to influence the band; I bought EPs from artists who were said to emulate the band; I bought a 5 pound bag of gummy bears and sat cross-legged in the corner my basement on a sunny summer day and listened to “If You’re Feeling Sinister” on repeat until the sun had set, the gummy bear stock had been severely depleted, and my excessive intake of sugar and wisdom had left me in a state most accurately described as a hallucinatory sugar-induced coma by medical doctors and pre-mature enlightened by the Buddhist monks who danced about in the darkness of my glucose-blackout. So it’s fair to say that I had high expectations for B&S’s new release.
Like it’s predecessor Dear Catastrophe Waitress, B&S use their new album to further carve themselves into a unique spot in the upbeat twee scene more so than they did in the edgier days of Tigermilk’s uncharted debut. Still, despite an increase in tempo, a bigger following, better recording equipment and a greater utilization of harpsichords and bells, from the outset of the new lp you can tell it’s the same B&S. Stuart’s characteristic verse and poetic wit remain, and the effort, like those before it, is defined by his refusal to follow a single coherent course void of noticeable discrepancies between both ideas themselves, and between the mediums that relay them. Act of the Apostle opens the album, bouncing with theological paradoxes reminiscent of If You’re Feeling Sinister, painting in the process a stained glass portrait of yet another hero torn between his or her mounting sexuality, fogged identity and wavering piety. No one does it better. Ripe in form, the album shines with clever contradictions referencing an assortment of topics atop a wider assortment of arrangements. Alluding to BDSM equipment and sexual ironies right alongside the books of Luke and John, the road to Damascus and traditional Christian hymns, it’s easy to see that pop hooks are mere footholds here and the work’s ascension is aided predominately by dexterous lyrics and the thought-provoking contrast they fling forth.
Early on it’s clear that The Life Pursuit is much more than a fun pop album. Sukie in the Graveyard explodes with fantastic production values, it’s lights casting forward the shadow of another classic Stuart drifter caught between The Smiths’ Cemetery Gates and his own Women’s Realm. The pop and pomp travels on guided by a Funny Little Frog that clogs our protagonist’s throat in the company of intangible devotion and ambition. (a story likely close to Stuart’s heart, as he too lives “the life of a poet/ …a jester in an ancient court,” spouting both verse and jokes sadly overlooked, incorrectly interchanged and ignorantly misconstrued by critical royalty.) Floating on calmer waters is “Dress Up in You” a piece suggestive of Silence of the Lambs-esque identity woes and wrought by the self-conscious formalities associated with coming to terms with social status and wealth, or lack there of.
The joyful contrast continues with Song for Sunshine, as it opens on a series of single-chord funk keys- notes commonly reserved for superficial sex-jams that Stuart turns on their head, using them as a backdrop for his reflections on man’s duty to both himself and others in employing the talents inborn within him while acting in an interrelated world slave to cause and effect algorithms. With call and response vocal play, White Collar Boy plots the star-crossed tale of law-crossed metropolitan lovers bound to differing social echelons all atop an infectious lifted Fleetwood Mac pulse. Street-strutting anthem The Blues are Still Blue reminds listeners that despite an upped commitment to candied-pop, B&S’s themes aren’t fading and they can still wrap the emotions of botched laundry into a song complete with references to kung-fu class and a David Wilkerson novel about gang members reformed by Christ.
I’ll admit that I commiserated briefly with thoughts of disappointment; how could I not with such high expectations.
Sure, I love the balls-to-the-wall pop, don’t get me wrong, but part of me hoped the new album would expand on the acoustic-charms of Waitress’s imaginative “Piazza New York Catcher,” instead of lending soft arrangements alone to drooping sad-core, high-pitched ballads. Disappointment embodied himself and he and I chatted about how we missed Isobel, how we were looking forward to some more Space Boy Dream spoken-word experimentation jive, and how we had wished that the recent embrace of re-released early EPs and a live version of If Your Feeling Sinister would draw the band back to their roots and edge the new disc with more rock-pop that pop-rock. Eventually I got over it and found with each additional listen that there was something new in The Life Pursuit that I couldn’t have expected, possibly something Disappointment and I would meet over again when this new force wasn’t expanded on future discs as we hoped and prayed.
In the end, it’s still Belle and Sebastian, and you know going in that they’re going to make it easy for you. You just have to trust them and hope that you’ll be able to appreciate the new craft before going out. And so, I suppose The Life Pursuit is a success. Triumphantly layering verse-worn words over all-sunshine-and-smile twee-pop arrangements, Belle and Sebastian have made a career out of selling themselves short, and they know it. With each release, they’ve increasing crafted challenging music that requires listeners to determinately milk appreciation from their art rather than merely drawing such enjoyment from a free-flowing tap, in the process packaging their pop in a form that’s painlessly easy to disregard as wandering expatriate garbage imported from the fields of1960’s bubblegum music. It makes sense on principle; as those willing to invest a mind rather than a mere ear deserve the biggest reward- but at the same time there’s a load more money to made by opening the flood gates and drowning your audience with genius craft that’s both approachable and easily extracted. When it comes down to it, you can follow the formula and put pop over pop and they’ll love you; you can follow the trend and drop thought over strings and be deified by critics, or you can stick to your guns and creatively force thought into pop and blaze a trail that, though disregarded at it’s outset, will ultimately be acclaimed when once-sleeping listeners are finally jostled awake at its ingenious destination.
(No Dan’s, Bald Men, or Corned Beef Sandwiches were harmed in the making of this review. Before driving under the influence of fatigue, gummy bears or OTC energy pills, consult with your doctor or Oprah [who, coincidentally, has chosen “The Longer Version,” of this review as her March Book of the Month. - It makes a great read and a perfect gift for a loved one on December 25th, Oprah’s Birthday.]
Vote Oprah!)
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