On “Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance,” Belle and Sebastian dip into dance music to inject their sunny disposition into times of far-reaching strife.
Over the last nineteen years, singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch’s has made bright indie pop their business, even from their overcast vantage of Glasgow. There’s seemingly no bummer Murdoch can’t—or won’t—transform into a playful reprise. There are people following you on a dark walk home? Pretend you’re and don’t look back. Even the depressive cycle outlined in is told with near ecstatic delivery, as if to suggest that no matter how glum it gets, we can always look forward to sleep.
For the band’s ninth record, “Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance,” Murdoch and co retain their sunny disposition in times of overt strife. Far reaching conflicts in the Middle East and the band’s own U.K. are prevalent on the album, viewed from the scope of characters in vaguely defined struggles of their own. As tipped in interviews, the LP’s first and best song, is an autobiographical one relating Murdoch’s struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome. As for the rest of the vignettes, who the characters are—if not all the same—is never as clear as the ominous forces lingering over them. (This might make them easier to relate to, but it makes for often bland storytelling.)
But no matter how bad it gets, “Girls In Peacetime” still aims at being fun, more so perhaps than most of their albums. Itap evident in disco and funk mode the band switches on early and often, including a six-minute political groove called “Enter Sylvia Plath.” The scene-by-scene storytelling and high tempo eighties dance music sound like an attempt at an ABBA-penned musical. That only clicks into place on “Perfect Couples,” which manages to sound naturally retro without curdling into cornball like the rest of the album’s synth-obsessed numbers.
When the band sticks to their old rose-tinted twee script, itap typically delightful. Itap hard to believe Murdoch has never written a song called “Ever Had A Little Faith?” before, but he crosses that one off with aplomb here, registering another song worthy to score the closing scene of an indie rom-com. Belle and Sebastian should be applauded for trying something different here, as so many bands might not have. But as “Allie” learns on “Girls in Peacetime Want To Dance” (“You bought a gun because you thought you would be someone else”), reinventing yourself isn’t as easy as saying you’ve changed, and more importantly, sometimes it simply isn’t meant to be.
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Dylan Owens writes album reviews, essays and features for Reverb. You can read more from him on , or the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
