Chance, a commenter on these threads, feels that Belle and Sebastian’s October release, “Write About Love,” is weak; I think it’s decent. Actually, we’re both right. It may be weak by B&S standards, but it’s decent by the standards of pop music in general.
My hopes for this album were too high for two reasons. First, it’s coming on the heels of 2006’s “The Life Pursuit,” which produced three of my all-time top 300 favorite songs. And that album was the follow-up to 2003’s “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” which features two more of my all-time top 300.
Second, this album is wonderfully titled “Write About Love,” and — whether you appreciate the lyrics (as Chance does) or the pop musicianship (as I do) — most fans agree that writing about love is what primary songwriter Stuart Murdoch does best.
Sadly, there are no top 300 songs on “Write About Love,” but all is not lost. I have trouble appreciating the last two discs in their entirety because I skip forward and backward to “I’m a Cuckoo” and “Another Sunny Day” so often. “Write About Love” has been in steady rotation in my Jeep for more than a month and I haven’t done any track-jumping. I haven’t fallen in love with this album, but I do like and respect it more and more.
Murdoch’s last effort before this was a side project and album called God Help the Girl, where women sang his songs, and clearly he’s still caught up in the idea. The catchiest song is the title track, which has a whimsical chorus nicely sung by actress Carey Mulligan: “I hate my job/ I’m working way too much/ Every day I’m stuck in the office/ At one o’clock/ I take my lunch up on the roof.” And then the backup vocalists kick in: “Up on the roof.”
Norah Jones sings the chorus of the slow but pretty “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John.” And Sarah Martin, responsible for the gorgeous “Asleep on a Sunbeam” from the ’04 album, is on board for other tracks like “I Can See Your Future” (“I’m living in the past/ You’re making history,” she laments).
The strongest outing featuring Murdoch’s vocals is “Come on Sister,” which has some tasty video game-ish electronic sounds. “I’m Not Living in the Real World” is a musical smorgasbord, whereas “Calculating Bimbo” and “Ghost of Rockschool” are slower but still pretty. “Read the Blessed Pages,” though, just strikes me as slow, complete with long woodwind breaks.
“Write About Love” isn’t a step forward for Belle & Sebastian, but it does show the band’s consistency. All of the tracks here would’ve fit somewhere on “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” or “The Life Pursuit,” even if they wouldn’t have stood out from the pack.