By Leo Shaw
Editor-in-Chief
Scottish indie-pop group Belle and Sebastian will release its eighth studio album, “Belle and Sebastian Write About Love,” on October 11.
This seven-member group from Glasgow has been building up to a prominent position in the music scene with the driving power pop of its last two albums, “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” and “The Life Pursuit,” but with this collection of songs the band has deftly sidestepped that archetype.
Belle and Sebastian’s modus operandi of building landscapes of mood has fallen by the wayside in recent memory, but “Write About Love” returns to the practice.
The group plays to its multiple songwriters and multi-talented lineup with a few characteristically catchy sing-along tunes, some medium-tempo ballads, and several more ponderous tracks that call to mind both 1998’s “The Boy With the Arab Strap” and the origins of the pop song itself.
In contrast to the almost strident hooks of “The Life Pursuit,” the band had managed to fashion its repertoire of vocal flourishes, synth backdrops, harmonies, and power pop guitar lines into something much calmer. Even the catchiest songs, “I Didn’t See It Coming,” “I Want The World To Stop” and “I’m Not Living In The Real World,” are lyrically driven by repetitive choruses that take on a murmuring quality.
The vocal give-and-take between frontmen Stuart Murdoch and Stevie Jackson and singer Sarah Martin, paired with extensive reliance on synthesizer, both help to sand down the band’s sound to a duller sheen than in past recordings, but also gives it a slower attitude that permeates the whole album.
Pop music is unique in its versatile ability to express so many shades of mood and emotion, which Belle and Sebastian interprets with ease. If that continuum was set equal to the color spectrum, “Write About Love” wouldn’t register as the sunny yellow of what the band has produced in the last few years, but its cooler hues are equally satisfying.
great review, leo! Very concise, gets yo point across