Features | Awards

The Would it Have Killed You to Try a Little Harder? Award

By David M. Goldstein | 7 December 2010

Belle & Sebastian
Write About Love
(Matador; 2010)







There’s nothing wrong with holding Stuart Murdoch’s merry band to a high standard. Homeboy wrote “Stars of Track and Field,” and is responsible for some of the greatest sad bastard pop gems of the past fifteen years. Further, 2006’s The Life Pursuit may have actually been his outfit’s strongest effort to date, the peak product of Belle & Sebastian’s gradual transformation from bookish Nick Drake acolytes to a joyous glam-pop ensemble, capable of evoking both Bolan and Bowie in the course of five minutes. Murdoch’s a smart guy, and clearly understands the career longevity thing.

So why did he think that anybody with a brain and two ears would willingly enjoy the back half of Write About Love? Pursuit producer Tony Hopfer is back on board, and the first Belle & Sebastian record in four years starts out promisingly, with songs both danceable (“I Didn’t See it Coming”) and deliriously catchy (“Come On Sister”). Really, everything up to and including the Norah Jones duet (yup) is pretty good, and I’ll even give Murdoch “Ghosts of Rock School” as another solid addition to his ever expanding canon of tender ballads serving as bones thrown to old-school fans (e.g. Pursuit’s “Dress Up in You,” Dear Catastrophe Waitress’s [2003] “Lord Anthony”).

But the title track is flower power pastiche bordering on self parody, the usually reliable Stevie Jackson bombs on a song that sounds like a skippable track on a Shins record, and the closing three songs are uninspired to the point where “phoned in” doesn’t quite suffice as a damning enough phrase (ACME-brand Random Belle & Sebastian Song Generator is more like it). So four years removed from The Life Pursuit’s thirteen track excellence we’re given what amounts to a six song EP? Sigh.