Chat Review: Belle & Sebastian - Write About Love
By You Can't Hear it on the Radio
December 7, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Noah: Belle & Sebastian's new album, Write About Love is their first since 2006's The Life Pursuit. It also passed Midlake's The Comfort of Strangers like it was standing still in the race for my most disappointing album of 2010.
Steve: After Life Pursuit, which was a great foray into a bluesy sonic direction for this band, my expectations for Write About Love could not have been higher. Unfortunately, despite there being a few things to commend their effort here, overall I agree with you that Write About Love is somewhere between a small and a huge miss.
Noah: I really felt like they had found a new phase. 2000's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant was a fine album, but seemed somewhat repetitious after Tigermilk, If You're Feeling Sinister and The Boy With the Arab Strap.
So, I was excited to hear 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit show progress and evolution. To follow that up with Write About Love, which just seems like a lazy album, is incredibly disappointing.
It's a regression.
Steve: I've spent a lot of time with Write About Love trying to pinpoint my specific issue. I think the songwriting is fine, though lyrically there's nothing memorable. I think it comes down to the production choices, which seem tame and uninspired. When I take each song as a standalone I like them well enough, but after the album is done I'm left flat. A Belle & Sebastian record should not come across as an afterthought, but this is the emotional chord they struck with me.
Noah: I agree completely. I don't know if it's possible for Belle & Sebastian to be aggressive, but they had been moving confidently on their last couple of albums. Write About Love is only aggressively boring.
Steve: It sounds like maybe they've run out of things to say.
Noah: I hope not. That would be startling after their previous two albums. It seems to me that one of the main symptoms of this is the sheer number of voices heard in major roles on this album. I counted at least five. I like that in a "wall of sound" context, or with a band that has consistency with the number of voices (something Belle & Sebastian were great at - in the past), but Write About Love is distractingly all over the place.
Steve: Like I said though there are individual highlights for me. Sometimes it's just a snippet within a song, unfortunately. I think the second half of the album, starting with the title track, is decent. The song "Write About Love" is probably my individual favorite, and I mostly like Stevie Jackson's song "I'm Not Living in the Real World". That song and several others feel like they're 80% of the way there.
Noah: Before we get into disagreeing about the song "Write About Love", can we at least ban breathy duets from Norah Jones for a few years?
Noah: In fact, I don't even want there to be a duet with Ravi Shankar any time soon. That's how sick of Norah Jones I am.
Steve: I'm picturing Stuart Murdoch listening to the finished product and saying "Norah Jones was a baaad choice", like he's channeling Anchorman after some milk and a long jog. Among the many things wrong with it, the song sounds like a Norah Jones song featuring Stuart Murdoch, not the other way around, and it glaringly stands apart from the rest of the album.
As I said to you the other day when we were discussing Album Killers, this song would be the poster child for such a concept if Write About Love were actually a good album to begin with.
Noah: I hate it. So much. Back to specific songs, though. You and I seem to like opposite parts of the album. You mentioned "Write About Love" and "I'm Not Living in the Real World". I have to say I hate both of those songs. The two songs I really like are "Come On Sister" and "I Want the World to Stop".
Steve: Both of those songs are decent, but pretty straightforward and kind of filler tracks for me. I at least admire what they were going for on "I'm Not Living in the Real World" even if they didn't get all the way there. I feel like "Come On Sister" turned out about as good as it was ever going to be - an okay song.
Big misses for me besides the Norah Jones song were "Calculating Bimbo", a ballad I didn't care for at all, and the lead track "I Didn't See It Coming" which was done no favors by Sarah Martin's vocals and some weak lyrical moments - "We don't have the money// Money makes wheels of the world go round// Forget about it honey// trouble's never far away when you're around". What does that even mean?
Noah: Agreed on all counts. I'm damning most of these songs with faint praise anyway. None of them would make a "Best of Belle & Sebastian" album if I had any say.
Steve: I guess that's what it comes down to for me - Belle & Sebastian have been unusually consistent, writing songs at a very high level throughout their entire recording career. They've put out a mediocre record, and relative to their track record it seems worse than it actually is. That's not enough to recommend it though.
Steve: Incidentally, their concert performance was equally uninspired. Something seemed amiss. Maybe it was early in the tour and they hadn't found their groove yet, but it was a bland, going through the motions affair.
Noah: I wonder if that's partially the material. I saw them on their last tour and they were terrifically engaging. So where do you put this album on our Great, Really Good, Good, So So, or Poor scale?
Steve: I give it a So So. It doesn't actively put me off, with the exception of the Norah Jones song, but I wish it were better and they are capable of better.
Noah: I'm sad to say it, but I have to give it a Poor. I'm just incredibly disappointed. It's an album I almost certainly will never come back to.
Steve: Yeah, when I'm in the mood for Belle & Sebastian I will likely go to just about any of their other albums ahead of this one.
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