This past summer at Montreal’s Osheaga Festival, I watched a 40-foot-tall Stuart Murdoch merrily play bongos on a Jumbotron—which is a collection of words that, 20 years ago, would’ve been impossible to string together, like trying to connect magnets with the same polarity. Back then, the prospect of the notoriously secretive Belle and Sebastian even performing live—let alone enthusiastically in front of thousands of people tossing around oversized corporate-branded beach balls—seemed to be as much of a soft-focus fantasy as the misty-eyed daydreams cataloged in their achingly intimate songs. But not only did Belle and Sebastian gradually blossom into one of the most generous and gregarious acts on the festival circuit, their records have become increasingly engineered to ensure the party rages on. By 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, the band had strayed far enough from their bedsit-indie roots that they could title a single about dancefloor seduction “The Party Line” and—thanks to its synth-glossed, four-on-the-floor beat—have it work as a double entendre.
But where Belle and Sebastian have ultimately decided it’s less fun to be the new Smiths than the old Chic, they’re at least revisiting some of their early battle-plans. Between now and February, the band will release three mini-albums under the banner of How to Solve Our Human Problems, a strategy that hearkens back to the trifecta of stellar EPs they released over the course of 1997. According to Murdoch, it’s a way for the band to bust out of the typical album/tour/repeat cycle—not to mention a savvy ploy for a veteran act to linger in our newsfeeds at a time when even the most hyped new albums seem to drop out of the conversation in mere weeks. (As he recently lamented to Stereogum, “I think these days when an LP comes out, it’s kind of disappointing. Nothing seems to happen.”) Rather than hunker down in some expensive studio with a producer and crank out an album on deadline, the band worked casually on their own clock in their native Glasgow, enlisting outside help only when the mood struck. As they did with those ’97 releases, they selected three flagship singles from their cache of recordings and built discrete EPs around each.
On the first volume of How to Solve Our Human Problems, the selected showroom model is “We Were Beautiful,” a song that inherits Peacetime’s bright synth sheen, but feels infected by the anxiety and malaise that has overcome the world since that album’s release. The skittering breakbeat immediately sets a more tense tone, as Murdoch veers from general expressions of depression (“I was black as I could be”) to the very specific feeling of inadequacy that afflicts you when walking through a gentrifying neighborhood full of fashionable people. (“We were in the urban scene, where they grind the coffee bean, where the women are oblique/And the boys are paper thin, ragged beards upon their chin, we were on the outside looking in.”) But a buoyant brass fanfare can’t quite elevate an undercooked, repetitious chorus that prevents the song from joining the pantheon of B&S best singles.
And that’s okay—because you’ll still be buzzing from the preceding track, which ranks among the greatest songs the band has produced this millennium. A rare Stevie Jackson/Murdoch duet, “Sweet Dew Lee” sees the band more subtly absorb the influence of ’70s dance music in a divine six-minute prog-disco suite that bounces laser-beamed synths off its glitter-ball grooves. Its lustrous aura obscures an increasingly tense tug-of-war between Jackson’s starry-eyed romantic idealist and Murdoch’s bitter-truth realist, who cautions, “Reconcile yourself to knowing/That glamour fades as time moves on.” It’s a line that Murdoch could very well be singing to himself, given that Belle and Sebastian’s days as indie rock’s most mysterious and feverishly analyzed band are far in the rearview and they’re now lodged firmly in their steady-as-she-goes middle-age phase.
But if Sarah Martin’s country-soul serenade “Fickle Season” is precisely the sort of breather ballad we’ve come to expect in the No. 3 slot on a given Belle and Sebastian record, “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” shows they’re still masters of sly subversion, as they twist a breezy, Eno-esque motorik-pop tune into the world’s peppiest protest song. What begins as a typically Murdochian portrait of a disillusioned, lovelorn young woman gradually zooms out to reveal the omnipresent geopolitical strife weighing on her psyche: “They’ll take profits over the people/They won’t make the country great again/Just as long as it’s white and wealthy/Fear the immigrant workforce!/Fear the kids raised on the internet!” Belle and Sebastian’s music always quietly railed against the bastards—the ex-lovers, the priests, the schoolyard bullies—that keep us down. These days, the bastards are bigger and more powerful, and so Belle and Sebastian project their voices all the more vigorously.
But if “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” sees the band successfully apply its insular lyrical perspective to current affairs, the EP’s closing track betrays the pitfalls of their carefree, hermetic recording process. The textbook definition of a meandering B-side jam, “Everything Is Now,” almost shares a title with Arcade Fire’s recent album/single, but it’s actually more like this EP’s “Infinite Content”—i.e., an elaborate set-up to a simple, dispiriting pun. Over a hippy-dippy, slow-clapped ’68-Beatles groove, and no small amount of organ noodling, the band repeatedly chant in unison, “everything is now/everything is different, now” before undercutting the celebratory mood by switching that last part to “everything’s indifferent, now.” It’s an alternately cheeky and weary riposte from a band that still obviously cherishes an intimate connection with their fans (to the point of featuring them on the new EPs’ cover photos), but is all too aware of how tenuous those connections can be in the age of perpetual distraction.
Twenty years ago, the release of a new Belle and Sebastian EP would send stateside fans rushing to their local record store and hounding the clerks to order an import copy; failing that, they’d have to hassle a relative in the UK to drop a copy in the post. Now, they can just drag and drop it into a Spotify folder along with the other 50 records they’ve dragged and dropped this week. Accordingly, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Part 1 is the sound of a band deploying its full arsenal of bells and whistles to seize your attention, even when the songs themselves aren’t always strong enough to retain the grip.
