The issue with the modern day Belle and Sebastian is that they won notebook-scribbling, tea-drinking, glasses-wearing hearts in the first place for making flawed pop – community hall versions of smoother, more polished pop music. They eventually caught up with themselves, career-wise, and started to do the studio thing properly, relying on the songs more than the aesthetic as a result. They’re still whispery Scots, but as for that lead guitar that rolls in halfway through the opener I Didn’t See It Coming… well, I didn’t see it coming. It’s slightly unfair to do the curmudgeonly thing of grumping about a band that started to sound a bit slicker. Bands grow up and decide that different parts of what they do are the important parts that need highlighting.
That’s fine. There’s no issue with that. It’s a separate thing to the band you listen to when you put on Tigermilk. But it’s also just a worse collection of songs. Things like I Want The World To Stop are devoid of personality, studio-built around a centre-pole of empty lyrics and dull chord progressions. Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John is just about in the realms of soft soul, but it could just as easily be a Daniel O’Donnell duet with a slightly cheesier keyboard line. The song Write About Love’s block harmonies and Motown-lite drive are a lot better, revisiting the popular B&S topic of being vaguely bored at work. But it’s still a little flat.
The subtext here is that, though it’d just be a listenable but unremarkable indie pop album if it was anyone else, this is an album by a band who actually changed some teenage lives. And the fact of the matter is that the musically uninquisitive parents they were probably annoyed at in an anti-punk twee type way while listening to It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career for the first time would likely enjoy this more than them. Sad truth.
Words: Karl McDonald
