For almost two decades, six-piece indie-pop outfit Belle and Sebastian have been making some serious waves in the music world with their unique fusion of light-hearted pop melodies and melancholy indie-rock. What astonishes me is that it took until 2014 for those waves to reach me. While I have yet to properly dive into the band’s catalog, boasting a total of nine studio albums, something about their odd style of indie-pop sprinkled with grungy poetic sadness had me hooked. After it was revealed to me that I’d be seeing them at Bonnaroo this summer, I was excited to see what the Glasgow natives had in store as they released their newest full-length album Girls In Peacetime Want to Dance, a release that was met with more hype than anything else in their discography.
The album’s first track “Nobody’s Empire” gets things rolling with a typical indie-rock intro, featuring clean guitars strumming through a four-chord progression that, to my knowledge, is shared by at least one song by every rock band that has ever recorded an album. Vocalist Stuart Murdoch brings his Smiths-influenced brand of poetic melancholy, as the first track is about his seven-year struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome. Several moments on the album remind me of the style that I’d heard from previous Belle and Sebastian records, but those moments were few and far between. The next three songs sound like they were recorded by three completely different bands that just happen to share a lead singer.
“Allie” jumps from a cappella vocal harmonies to a bouncing, minor-key folk-rock jam with haunting organ melodies, vastly more energetic than what I expected from the beginning of the album. However, several songs later I realized that Belle and Sebastian were very serious about expanding their horizons on this record. Instrumentals on “The Party Line” sound like a melting pot of modern electro-pop and organ-rich psychedelic sounds of an older generation, “The Power Of Three” lays sawtooth synth melodies alongside clean guitar strumming and “The Cat With The Cream” slices the tempo in half and brings the orchestral string parts into the mix. Girls In Peacetime Want to Dance is an experiment in genre hopping. To a certain extent, this makes for a much less cohesive collection of songs than I had anticipated, but I wouldn’t hold it against them. The only thing that remains consistent throughout the album is Murdoch’s distinct voice, which inexplicably sounds incredible on every track, despite the eclectic style.
My only regret is that delicate down-tempo songs like “Ever Had A Little Faith?” while reminiscent of the poetic lyrics we’ve all come to expect from Murdoch, were actually rather optimistic and lacked the aura of melancholy that gave their older music its magic. But overall, the remainder of the album didn’t let me down. From “Enter Sylvia Plath” and its ’80s-style synth pop melodies to “The Everlasting Muse” driving a bass groove into a gypsy-like folk explosion, I think the band’s attempts to expand their horizons were mostly successful. Whether you attribute that success to the incredible individual talent of all six musicians or to impeccable production work by Ben H. Allen III, this album is proving to be a no-skip for me, and I can’t wait to see what else the band has in store for us.
Rating: B+
