The Scottish band have written an album about love, but was that the predominant emotion of our album club while listening to it? Club manager Daragh Downes reveals all
EXPERIMENTAL. Edgy. Groundbreaking. Stunning. Just some of the words used by none of our guests to describe Belle and Sebastian Write About Love. Instead they use phrases such as bookworm pop, slippers rock and red-wine music. “Nice” gets a look-in at several points – and rarely in a nice way.
By unanimous accord, then, this is a record that plays it safe. So safe that it might just as easily have been called Belle and Sebastian Write a Number of Belle and Sebastian Songs. Glasgow’s favourite cardigan-wearing indie-pop purveyors, it seems, have morphed into their own tribute band.
yyy HUNG JURY
And yet, for all our four guests’ consensus on the defiantly unadventurous character of the album, there is no agreement around the table as to its actual quality. The panel is split pretty much down the middle.
For O Emperor frontman Paul Savage and music enthusiast Jack Clarke, the album has become something of a guilty pleasure. Yes, both have found it hard to ignore the numerous “borrowings” from other people’s songs: these are, as Savage notes, too “blatantly obvious” to miss. Yes, there are some moments of toe-curling cheesiness. And yes, some of the lyrics are irritatingly naff in a college diary, second-hand bookshop kind of a way.
Nevertheless there is something about this record that prompts the pair to mount a stout case for the defence. Once you get past the songs’ deceptively candy-coated pop surface, they insist, there is quite a lot to admire.
Says Savage: “It’s kind of like, on the surface, most people will just see it as very simple melodies. But when you get down to what the band is actually playing, some of the grooves and some of the actual playing on it, I think it’s just brilliant. And it’s incredibly understated, which I think can be a very powerful thing.”
Savage reckons the species of classic song craft in this record is becoming all too rare. “They’re writing some very well-crafted songs and they’re executing them very well. There is a huge amount of thought put into the actual songs themselves, and then going out into the big highway of music it kind of gets a little bit trampled.”
Clarke, who describes himself as “a moderate Belle and Sebastian fan, not an avid one”, very gallantly agreed to step in for his mum, broadcaster Marian Finucane, when a scheduling snag forced her to pull out of the panel. This means he has had slightly less time to inhabit the album’s world than the other three guests. But the record has still had time to trump unfavourable first impressions.
“Initially I didn’t like the album at all. First time I listened to it, the only song I really warmed to was the title track, just because it was sort of jingly-jangly and I liked the lyrics. I actually thought at the start that a lot of the songs sounded like Christmas carols or like songs that could be sung at a midnight Mass. But the album is growing on me. It started off very poor, but now I’m starting to like it a little bit more.”
While Clarke might not be quite as warmly disposed towards the album as Savage, it does seem to be heading in the right direction. He suspects it might never amount to anything more than “the sort of music you listen to when you clean the house before your mum comes”, but still reckons it has enough of that certain “níl a fhios agam cad é” to reward repeated listens.
yyy THE GRUDGE
MayKay is also ambivalent about the album: sometimes she hates it, other times she just despises it. Declaring with deliciously scary brio that she will forever hold a grudge against us for having made her listen to this “lounge music”, she says: “They tricked me! They had the nerve to put two brilliant songs, I Didn’t See it Coming and Come on Sister, number one and two on the album to make me think they’d written a good album. But then! What the hell are tracks three to six and eight to 11 about? Nothing! Fish or some shit!”
A good three-quarters of this album, then, is muzak to MayKay’s ears – a problem made worse by the way it has been front-loaded with two of its three decent tracks. (If you haven’t spotted by now that MayKay also quite likes track seven, then you might consider taking up Sudoku.) Not that she has any problem with a band “just doing what they like doing” and not trying to come up with something “new and different and progressive” every time. She just finds the “cliff jump” in quality that takes place in the middle of the album unforgiveable.
yyy THE HAMBURGER YEARS
While MayKay’s annoyance is not shared by Paul Howard, her dismissive verdict on the album is. Having given the CD some 15 or 16 listens, the scourge of Dublin 4 finds himself left with nothing but indifference.
“It grew off me!” he explains. “I have listened to lots and lots of albums that grew on me over time. And I actually really liked this on first listen, but found it counter- infectious, almost. The more I listened to it the more kind of dull and bleached-out it seemed.”
Howard reckons that this record tracks Belle and Sebastian’s entry into their “Fat Elvis” phase, as they cash in on the “enormous market for bland” that’s out there by releasing a “happy and satisfied and safe” product that won’t scare the horses.
“It’s a band reaching into middle age who are perhaps sort of tailoring their act to suit their age profile, the ageing profile of their listenership. There’s no attempt to hold back the years or anything. They’re just sort of accepting.”
Howard adds that the inclusion of Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John, a by-numbers country duet between Stuart Murdoch and Norah Jones – or “Snorah”, as he calls her – marks “a particular low point” for the band. It is as if Murdoch is positioning himself for a move to full-time commercial songwriting, whereby “all of his future output will be as a writer of songs for other people, in a Burt Bacharach kind of way”.
Clarke tries to sum up the appeal of Write About Love by looking for “a word to describe something that grows slowly over time”. MayKay chimes in helpfully: “Fungus?”
“No,” laughs Clarke. Cue furrowing of the brow from Paul Howard. “Tumour?” he offers.
