BELLE AND SEBASTIAN
The Life Pursuit
(Matador)
Play If You’re Feeling Sinister Live at the Barbican
(iTunes)
·Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
For the longest time, Belle & Sebastian seemed capable of swerving around the tried and true (not to mention terrifying) notion of artists outgrowing their talent, the group’s window of one stellar release after the other implying they’d somehow found a cosmic loophole towards perfection.
The Life Pursuit, on the other hand, shows flaws that Belle & Sebastian cannot overcome – the worst of which is a disturbing loss of personality in favour of studio trickery, and choosing dumb hooks that don’t quite work over artistic cachet . One of the most charming bedsit poets in history, Stuart Murdoch comes off as an ill-fitting front man, his pre-guitar solo shouts of "Huah!" and "Oh yeah!" just simply embarrassing. And whereas his previous catalogue of works held the weight of true-life experience, The Life Pursuit shows Murdoch pulling the veil of celebrity over his face, disappearing into a world of caricature instead of character.
The music itself falters in sounding like it was assembled in a weekend’s worth of studio rush – "Dress Up In You" is indeed lovely, but suffers from sounding like the band’s just warming up, while album finale "Mornington Crescent" sounds like it’s stuck on a roundabout going nowhere. At its worst, The Life Pursuit sounds like latter-day Suede ("For the Price of a Cup of Tea" might as well be "She’s in Fashion"), no big surprise given producer Tony Hoffer’s hand in the downfall of what was once one of Britain’s most promising groups since the 1970s. As a record, it all comes off as ineffectual and impersonal, a monumental shrug in search of bald-faced chart success.
Thank goodness, then, for the peaks. "Another Sunny Day" sits comfortably alongside old-fashioned Belle & Sebastian, a lyrical bon mot concerning bugs wedged in eyes and the misguided tongues used to dislodge them. "To Be Myself Completely" and "Funny Little Frog" are indeed the group’s finest attempts at aping Motown – "Frog" in particular sticking out as the group’s most concise and packed three minute single yet. When they’re not trying to squeeze into Thin Lizzy-style rocker shoes that don’t fit, Belle & Sebastian still have it. It’s surprising, then, that 10 years down the line from If You’re Feeling Sinister they’re only now stumbling around in feeble search of identity.
Consider it oddly fitting timing that the download-only album Belle and Sebastian Play If You’re Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican hit iTunes the same week The Life Pursuit itself was leaked on the Internet. Considered disappointing by the group themselves, Sinister still stands as their definitive work, their self-professed weaknesses part of the record’s undeniable charm. While this new version in front of an audience may indeed be performed by players far more comfortable with both their instruments and appearing in front of an audience, it is by no means an improvement on the original, for the most part just a tight retelling of the very same stories with hand-claps interspersed within.
A decade ago, Murdoch punctuated Sinister’s "Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying" with the fey battle cry, "nobody writes them like they used to / so it may as well be me." The Life Pursuit seems at times ample proof that those days of perfection and the longing thereof are sadly over.
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