Stuart Murdoch always writes about love, but has he ever written a love song? For the sake of this argument: No, he has not. He’s long been generous in detailing the loves and lethargies of boys and, more often, girls for whom he has a peculiar fondness, but if he actually loves anybody, I don’t know who it is. That’s what made the gambit of the new Belle & Sebastian album title and its advance single so tantalizing. There’s something very satisfying about the way Murdoch has refused to be a confessional songwriter (and when he is, he makes it count, as on the classic “The State I Am In”—another fiction, perhaps, but the rare first-person lyric that strikes me as profoundly personal). But after all these years of deflection with tales of Judy, Jane, The Girl, and others, this man has told me next to nothing about himself, and my curiosity is at an all-time high. So does Write About Love promise not just the status quo, does it slyly allude to a degree of revelation we’ve never seen in the work of Belle & Sebastian before?
If we’re holding out hope for the latter, then our hypothetical promise of revelation extends a little ways past the title and into the opening couplet of the splendid “I Didn’t See It Coming,” one of the band’s loveliest beginnings yet:
Make me dance, I want to surrender
Your familiar arms I remember
Has there ever been a Belle & Sebastian lyric so free of context, so purely romantic? These words are loaned out, if you will, to vocalist Sarah Martin, but then Murdoch makes a grand entrance later on (one of many big “happenings” in the song’s softly dramatic unfolding, like a more subdued “Stars of Track and Field”) and stays to sing lead on seven of the album’s remaining ten tracks, making this one of the band’s least ensemble-oriented records, despite the welcome contributions of Norah Jones, Carey Mulligan, and all umpteen band members. There have been Belle & Sebastian albums in which vocal and songwriting duties are shared among many members, and on those there often seems to be an unwillingness to concede Murdoch’s status as MVP. But here he is nearly omnipresent.
So the question remains: What do we learn about Murdoch here that we didn’t know before? The answer is, sadly, not much, though in hindsight he never promised otherwise, or anything beyond what is implied by his past successes: nicely told tales and nicely drawn sketches. “Calculating Bimbo” conjures up another one of those lackadaisical girls that I can’t believe I am meant to care about, but then renders her so faithfully that my objections melt away. And from its rare moments of true and deep expressions of real and unrequited love (that opening couplet, again, or the hot and intellectual imaginary man who “understaaaands,” on the title track), this album derives the sort of youthful energy that has weirdly been more evident in the band’s 21st century output than in the work of its actual youth.
Call it The Rejuvenation, Pt. 3. The soul influences that were so gleefully flaunted on Dear Catastrophe Waitress or The Life Pursuit are more carefully internalized here, but they do still register in a big way, the bass line of “The Ghost of Rockschool” particularly reminiscent of Smokey Robinson’s Miracles (think “I Like It Like That,” where the bass man makes everything all right). “Come On Sister” is without a doubt the best song here, and what I would call a primary colors pop song, given the way its bright and simple and buzzy melody (the synthesized one) cuts through the emotional and lyrical content and leaves behind only a feeling of clear-eyed well-being (a process epitomized by the guitar solo on Teenage Fanclub’s “Slow Fade”).
It’s no surprise to find songs as good as this one on Write About Love, and if I seemed skeptical before, it’s only because after so many years of such remarkable consistency (those who mark the wonderful Fold Your Hands Child as some kind of career nadir are wrong), it seems only sensible to question this consistency, rather than passively accept it. On “Write About Love,” Murdoch advises, “It can be in any tense,” and later, “It can be in any form.” He’s still choosing tenses and forms that frustrate my curiosity (and that’s something I need to work out, with myself) but also keep me interested, all these years later.
