plorentz's Full Review: The Life Pursuit by Belle & Sebastian
Everything changed the day Sebastian won the nomination for prom king. They had announced the nominations during the principal’s morning address over the PA system, and as his name was called, amidst the predictable roster of football players and chisel-cheeked hunkoids, a visible gasp rippled across the desks in the art room.
It was a dusty, abandoned-looking place tucked back in the darkest reaches of the high school, back behind the gymnasium, which, of course, was both the center and geographical limit of the administration’s apparent interest, the source of their most publicizable success – that being the fierce basketball team, on their way to their 3rd State Championship in as many years – and the focus of the school board’s most lavish budgetary affection.
But when Sebastian’s name was called, the dust itself seemed to shudder in surprise. The paint on the oppressive cinderblock walls - a dull shade of not-quite-white-or-yellow - seemed somehow suddenly and sickly vivid. Faces turned to pale, pierced faces in looks of shock and admiration, bemusement, befuddlement, utter disbelief and maybe just a tiny hint of jealousy. A Judas had probably been born in that moment, but nobody knew or cared at that point. As for Sebastian himself, he seemed a drop of water on a piece of wax paper, wanting desperately to soak himself into it, but remaining, incontrovertibly, conspicuous.
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It hasn't been easy for some of his followers to accept, but Stuart Murdoch, the mastermind behind the seven-person indie-pop collective known as Belle & Sebastian has started to come out of his shell. When he began his little project, he was a lonely student suffering through a long bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. In its earliest incarnations, the band - outside of its music, of course, which was always gentle and literate and sorta-hip in a not-entirely-intentional sorta way - had always been enigmatically anonymous. They didn't give interviews. They didn't make public appearances. Their names weren't in the credits to their albums. They didn't have band photos. Their sound was fragile, but their identity - or rather, their (and by "their", I mean, primarily, Murdoch's) protective shell - was impenetrable.
But if cracks started to show on their last studio album, 2003's lovely Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Murdoch and crew have emerged from the shell entirely - sheepishly, perhaps, but also shamelessly, with The Life Pursuit, the most ebulliently extroverted release in their canon, and to my mind, their most deliciously realized as well. (And heck, in the liner notes, they answer their fan mail!)
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When he really thought about it, it had never really been Sebastian's choice to be what he was in school, that is the quiet, and in the minds of his peers - the ones who paid him any attention at all - super-brilliant, super-talented creator of strangely affecting figure paintings that, as Deirdre overheard Mr. Fleischer the art teacher commenting to Ms. Montgomery in the hall one day, "evoked the sexual angst of Lucien Freud while retaining the child-like whimsy of Dr. Seuss". He did not feel in the least bit self-conscious about his paintings, nor would he have known who Lucien Freud was if he had been asked; and it was that innocence of ego - not mention his "one-of-us"-ness among the artsy crowd - that had made him (unbeknownst to him) the Single Most Desirable Boy North of the Basketball Hoops of Stuart Murdoch High.
It must be said, then, that it was also due to no special effort on his part that he won The Nomination, as it was subsequently known around these parts. Like his fellow art students, Sebastian had always presumed his own insignificance to the school (and indeed, the world) outside this dusty art room. It was as much a surprise to him that anybody from "out there" even knew his name, as it was that they had chosen him, of all people, to be one of the people who might possibly be the Prom King.
One might naturally assume that the art-girls may have formed a voting bloc solid enough in both loyalty and numbers to land the nomination, if not an actual win; but such theories were later quashed when many of the art-girls confessed to having voted for Cort Jefferson, the wrestler who made a surprisingly strong showing on the school forensics team the previous year. (And though common knowledge amongst the jocks, it was unknown to most in the art-wing that Jefferson had only joined the forensics team as a plea bargain of sorts with Ms. Elvers, who had caught him plagiarizing his term paper on Flowers for Algernon.) Still, so deep ran the art-girls' collective social defeatism that, if they voted for Prom Royalty at all, they generally voted for the obvious Popular Guy - never one of their own.
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Belle & Sebastian has always been more convincing as an EP-focused enterprise, their particularly insular vision, born, apparently, of long, sunny days spent in nerdy bedroom solitary, playing out more effectively in little three-or-four-song bursts than they do in longer, more labor-intensive album formats. None of their earlier albums ever came together cohesively despite a bounty of lovely, inspired moments. But, on their EPs, they were able to retain the "momentariness" of those moments while packing those 10 or 15 minutes with enough focused vision to suggest a fully realized work of art. Far more indispensable to me than their most critically revered early albums (The Boy With Arab Strap, and If You're Feeling Sinister) are EPs like I'm Waking Up to Us and 2004's terrific Books (itself built around an album track from Dear Catastrophe Waitress).
So one of the great surprises about The Life Pursuit is just how much it feels like one of the band's EPs. Its melodies are uniformly light and poppy and contagious, like a big bowl of colorful jellybeans; its grooves are upbeat and even confidently funky and (gasp) soulful - embellished with nifty retro bits of electric piano and chugging glam guitar riffs. True, there's not a trace of the earlier band's Sunday morning dreariness - and true, though these are the same seven people who recorded the band's last album, the group's prior history is marked with numerous personnel changes - but they lose none of their book-smart wit, nor any of their beautifully scrawny outsider charm.
Stuart Murdoch has always sung like that guy at the used book store who, after swiping my debit card, always asks me if I'm related to (Pare) Lorentz, the Depression Era documentary filmmaker. And he still does, but on songs like the adorable "Sukie in the Graveyard", he does so with a sex-symbol swagger; the song's irrepressibly funky bassline mandating the rubberband neck and the white-man's overbite in even the meekest, unfunkiest of listeners. "Song for Sunshine" with its syncopated singalong melody on the verse, sounds like nothing so much as a song stolen from the Fat Albert gang.
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Of course, if it was Sebastian's one-of-us-ness that had made him so desirable to the girls in the dusty art room in the first place, it was also what made his sudden popularity at school feel like such a betrayal to them. Whenever he walked into class, their voices hushed to whispers, their faces wounded.
Mr. Fleischer, somewhat oblivously relishing the boy's reversal of fortune (if that, indeed, is what it was), continued hanging Sebastian's Freud-by-way-of-Seuss paintings in the "gallery" (really it was just the hall in the art wing that connected the two art rooms to the rest of the ambivalent school); but where his fellow students used to gather after school to ponder them before Forensics practice, engaging in long, thoughtful discussions of, like, their meanings and their deepness and their, like, totally gothic spirituality, now they merely passed them as if they were a collection of those cheesy motivational posters of sailboats and sunsets captioned with a single word like TEAMWORK. The unspoken "motivational" caption now lingering in the girls' minds as they passed them on their way into class: WHATEVER. Now that Sebastian was popular, his paintings no longer spoke to them so intimately. They hardly spoke to them at all. Except to mock them. So they felt, at least.
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The easy pop cheeriness of The Life Pursuit, not to mention the confidence of its songwriting, and its clean, compact, and very witty production (by Tony Hoffer), and finally its coherent "album-ness" is what makes the record such an unexpected and unassuming masterpiece. No matter how disconcertingly hooky songs like "For the Price of a Cup of Tea" and "The Blues Are Still Blue" are, the songs nevertheless never feel insipid or cheap, but rather genuinely joyous, and often, improbably sexy. "Oh, if I could make sense of it all," Murdoch sings in the chorus of the opener "Act of the Apostle I" (reprised later in the album, in a higher, even more endearing key), but the truth is that there's no making sense of this.
These are songs that would sound great on a Saturday morning Belle & Sebastian animated series, but they aren't cartoonish. These are songs that want desperately to be anthologized by K-Tel for As Seen on TV pop compilations, but understand deeply that they won't be. These are songs where girls are girls and men are boys; they exist in a world where everyone has E.M. Forster in their backpack and a near-mint vinyl copy of The Kinks' Arthur on their bedroom turntable. In short, it is what it is, and whatever it is, its pretty darned wonderful.
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As it turned out, Sebastian didn't get voted Prom King, and by the next spring, his unlikely nomination seemed a distant memory to the student body of Stuart Murdoch High. Though the art-girls had long since abandoned Sebastian for more scattered, individualized adorations of less-likely candidates, Sebastian's work, Mr. Fleischer observed to Ms. Montgomery in the hallway between third and fourth periods, was flourishing in spite of the girls' collective cold shoulder. In fact, as he put it, Sebastian seemed to have "shrugged off the tyranny of the girls' devotion", to emerge with a "new, tremendously vital approach to portraiture" that "deftly used his hip outsider status" to "tweak the vulgar conventions of 1970s pop culture."
Yes, everything changed the day Sebastian won the nomination for Prom King. Not everybody liked it, but I thought it was really, very nice.
Mr. John Fleischer
February 2006
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"The Life Pursuit" by Belle & Sebastian
Matador Records
Released 2/7/06
Produced by Tony Hoffer
49 min.
SONGS: Act of the Apostle I - Another Sunny Day - White Collar Boy - The Blues Are Still Blue - Dress Up in Blue - Sukie in the Graveyard - We Are the Sleepyheads - Song for Sunshine - Funny Little Frog - To Be Myself Completely - Act of the Apostle II - For the Price of a Cup of Tea - Mornington Crescent
After making seven albums, Belle and Sebastian have just made the most forceful record of their career. Most people may think they ve got them pegged ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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