There is a lot of hype surrounding Belle & Sebastian’s newest, The Life Pursuit. It’s the New and Improved Belle & Sebastian! They’re a whole new band! They’ve really turned a corner! While I won't argue with claims that this is a fantastic album—it is; go buy it—there is an underlying, perhaps unconscious negativity to these many reviews, and it has everything to do with their critically impervious album, If You’re Feeling Sinister.
David M. Goldstein at Coke Machine Glow spells it out explicitly when he diagnoses B&S with having Violent Femmes Syndrome. “Stuart Murdoch need only ask the likes of Gordon Gano,” he says; “achieving perfection on your first go-round is a special kind of hell.” Murdoch & Co. are at the mercy of the critics: they will never escape the shadow of their breakout album. And that’s too bad, because The Life Pursuit is stellar. On that, it seems most critics can agree. “It’s their best album since Sinister!” But there I must part ways: The Life Pursuit is their best album since their last one, Dear Catastrophe Waitress. While I nearly weep at the idea of Gordon Gano’s Sisyphean battle to pop his sun-obliterating blister, I take umbrage at the easy impulse to lump B&S into the same funk.
The standard take on Belle & Sebastian, as you will no doubt read in every single review of this album, the last album, and every album to come, is that they were brilliant out of the docks, sank to progressively unsalvageable depths with their three subsequent releases, and have lately managed to cork the leak and keep whoever was left—fans and bandmembers alike—inside the boat. Somehow their two most recent albums are great—but with the caveat that you must already be a fan to appreciate them correctly. Woe to the youngster who mistakenly starts with The Life Pursuit: you just won’t get it. You’ll hear this polished, erudite, eminently hummable pop, and you just won’t understand. All those references to twee, all those remarks on Murdoch’s wit—right over your head, sorry.
Two years ago I would have agreed with Goldstein tagging B&S as a latter-day Violent Femmes. I had completely written them off, and took all those reviews of DCW—“their best album since Sinister!”—with a shaker of salt. But when I finally heard it, it captivated me. Two years later and I still listen to it all the time. There’s not a bad song on the disk. Unlike The Boy with the Arab Strap, which was a flawed carbon copy of Sinister, and Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, which sounds like a bunch of kids fantastically bored with themselves, the band that showed up to record Dear Catastrophe Waitress was reinvigorated and ready to pop. It was unmistakably Belle & Sebastian, but it didn’t sound like it owed anything to Sinister. They’d grown.
The album was rightly hailed as a comeback. Yet on the occasion of The Life Pursuit, both Pitchfork and Coke Machine Glow retroactively invoke the “transitional” damnation to DCW: “As enjoyable as much of Dear Catastrophe Waitress was, it suffered from having the distinct feeling of a transitional record,” says Golstein; “The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional,” says Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see nearly identical critiques—especially when they’re wrong—my PR-radar goes way up. Where’s the press release for this album?
[Here it is, from Matador’s website: “The decision to partner up with producer Trevor Horn for the last record (Dear Catastrophe Waitress) was a clear statement of intent—‘Think we’re lo-fi underachievers? Think again—we’re working with the guy who does Tatu.’ What is now clear—with producer Tony Hoffer back at the helm—is that DCW was but a stop on the way. And what that album started, The Life Pursuit delivers in spades.”]
When DCW came out two years ago, it was roundly hailed as their best work since Sinister. Now, what do you know—hand me that ad copy, please—The Life Pursuit is their best since Sinister! I can’t begrudge anyone for liking The Life Pursuit more than DCW—it is a great album, by all means—but it shouldn’t necessarily mean that DCW somehow loses its own luster as a result. Where is it written that Belle & Sebastian may only have two good albums at a time?
And so we return to the Violent Femmes Syndrome. Goldstein makes the explicit connection, but I would argue that nearly every other critic, consciously or not, is implicitly agreeing by treating Belle & Sebastian not as skilled songwriters with a sound unmistakably their own, but as a group in a constant scramble to match their moment of fluke genius seven years back.
Nothing wrong with loving Sinister the most, of course, nor with hoping that this or the next one will be the best period, not the best since. But I think it’s unfair to hold them so rigidly against that album. Elliott Smith’s second, self-titled album was his best, but that album wasn’t invoked as the barometer of any that followed. He made enough strong showings to be respected as an artist, not a one-trick pony. All the idolatry of Sinister would have you believe that there’s only one way to enter Belle & Sebastian, but this simply isn’t true. The uninitiated could surely appreciate the group if they discovered them through their newest or through DCW. In other words, this is a band that remains relevant, one that you shouldn’t feel like you missed the boat on, shouldn’t feel guilty about returning to, shouldn’t be intimidated by the mythology bestowed on Sinister.
If The Life Pursuit proves anything, it’s that Belle & Sebastian can make two great records in a row and can evolve at the same time—something they’ve never proven before. In a just world, it should be enough to toss out the Violent Femmes references altogether and start treating their entire oeuvre with more admiration. If they keep it up, If You’re Feeling Sinister won’t seem like the legendary acme; Fold Your Hands and Storytelling will be the legendary depths. This is a band that has had a few missteps, but they’ve certainly found their footing and are cutting a path worth following.
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