Nick Bollinger ponders Belle and Sebastian’s solutions to our human problems.
Belle and Sebastian Photo: supplied
There was some small sense of novelty about the announcement that Belle and Sebastian would be releasing a set of three EPs – one per month – starting last December. But with the arrival last week of the third and final of these discs, the package was complete and, taken all together, it really adds up to just another Belle and Sebastian album. Which is not a bad thing.
How To Solve Our Human Problems Photo: Matador Records
How To Solve Human Problems is the collective title of the three EPs, which can now in fact be purchased as one single album, and it covers this veteran Scottish indie group’s usual range of concerns, both musical and philosophical, as well as a few new ones.
In ‘We Were Beautiful’ (from the first of the three EPs) we’re confronted with something I hadn’t heard on a Belle and Sebastian record before: drum’n’bass. But if their version of the ‘Amen break’ points to the dancefloor, Stuart Murdoch’s lyric makes it clear that this is a dancefloor that exists only in the memory.
Wistful reflection has been this band’s stock in trade ever since their first releases, two decades ago now, and there’s plenty of it here. But there’s also been a perceptible shift, at least in the songs Murdoch sings. For one thing, he’s older now: 49, at the time of this album’s release. And while his songs often hone in on the intensity of youthful feeling – something he has always captured well – his songs now, inevitably, look back to his younger years, or else address the youth of today, including - in ‘I’ll Be Your Pilot’ - his own children.
There’s a comforting tone to the song that just skirts the edges of sentimentality and gets away with it, but it’s a tone that runs right through the album.
In recent years, Stuart Murdoch has apparently embraced Buddhism and there are traces of it, both subtle and more obvious, throughout this collection. Perhaps most overtly, there’s the simple mantra of the dreamy, slightly trippy and otherwise instrumental track he’s called ‘Everything Is Now’.
And then there are the gently positive vibes he imparts in a ‘There Is An Everlasting Song’, where he starts to song uncannily like his old compatriot, Donovan in his 60s heyday.
The gentle philosophising extends also to the songs led by Belle and Sebastian’s other main voice: violinist and vocalist Sarah Martin. Listen to her ‘Fickle Season’.
There are still traces of the ironic humour that characterised this group’s work, right up to 2015’s Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance. ‘A Plague On Other Boys’ is a typically wistful track with a title Morrissey might have come up with; only in Stuart Murdoch’s hands it becomes a fully developed song, not just a title in search of one. And the album is full of lingering pop melodies that might have been left over from a Sandie Shaw session, which they marry to serviceable grooves ranging from folk-rock to disco.
But there’s no mistaking the new air of near-contentment that seems to be settling over this band as it reaches maturity. Even the collection’s title, How To Solve Our Human Problems, has Buddhist connotations, borrowed apparently from a book by a Nepalse monk. The album, of course, couldn’t ever live up to the promise of that title. But at least for the duration that it’s playing, those problems can pleasantly dissolve.
How To Solve Our Human Problems is available on Matador
