It's easy to think of Belle and Sebastian as the Stuart Murdoch show. He's their main singer, their frontman, the guy who wrote everything on their first two albums and almost all the good stuff they've done since then; when the band started incorporating other members' songs and voices, they made a couple of dodgy records. But last year's God Help the Girl project-- songs from what seems to be an entirely hypothetical movie musical-- put the lie to the "Belle and Sebastian are both Stuart!" theory: even though Murdoch wrote all of it (and members of Belle and Sebastian played on it), it came off as a misstep, stagier and more ungainly than anything the parent band had ever done, mostly because it felt like the work of a revue-with-backup rather than an ensemble.
And they really are an ensemble, even now, after a nearly five-year break since The Life Pursuit. Playing as a group has always been one of their strengths; for a band that has an instantly recognizable sound (the first 12 seconds of "I Can See Your Future" or "Write About Love" might as well be someone yelling "THIS RIGHT HERE IS A SONG BY BELLE AND SEBASTIAN"), they have no particularly distinctive instrumentalists, just a finely developed sense of how to support each other's timbres and rhythms.
This time, they're integrating their voices into their collective sound, too. Murdoch's honey-ripple tenor appears, one way or another, on almost everything here, but it's not the first voice on the album: That belongs to Sarah Martin, whose opening imperative, "Make me dance/ I want to surrender," is, in its way, Murdoch's version of PJ Harvey's "Lick my legs/ I'm on fire." All over the album, the band's members and their guests harmonize with each other, trade off lines, sing in counterpoint. That's generally a great idea, with one prominent exception. Belle and Sebastian occasionally like to do the last thing you'd expect them to do: cover "Freak Scene", get produced by Trevor Horn, have ?uestlove sit in on drums. The sore thumb here is "Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John", a torchy duet between Murdoch and Norah Jones, who seems to be trying to channel Dusty Springfield but ends up channeling, well, Norah Jones.
For the most part, though, Write About Love is a consolidation of Belle and Sebastian's strengths, rather than an expansion into new territory. Murdoch is still writing long, curly, elegant melodies-- "Come on Sister", in particular, is a magnificent piece of construction. He's still writing lyrics about a fraught but unshakeable relationship with Christianity: When he sings "I know the way/ Get on your skinny knees and pray," "Write About Love"'s guest singer Carey Mulligan chirps back, "Maybe not today," and the refrain of "The Ghost of Rockschool" namedrops God repeatedly. He's gotten a little cagier about telling stories and outlining characters in his lyrics, although a few of them vaguely allude to a breakup, and "Read the Blessed Pages" seems to be addressed to a former lover/bandmate. (That might be just another storytelling gambit: Murdoch's always fictionalized and mythologized the band's history in his songs, too.)
Musically, the band's settled into one of the modes they've repeatedly touched on in the past: a chiming, mod-inflected variation on early-70s AM pop. Stevie Jackson's showcase here, "I'm Not Living in the Real World", even incorporates multiple "truck-driver's gear-shift"-style upward key changes. There's nothing as adventurous as "Your Cover's Blown" (or as overreaching as "The Eighth Station of the Cross Kebab House") here-- nothing, in fact, that couldn't easily have descended from early songs like "The Stars of Track and Field" and "You're Just a Baby". Still, the album includes some of their smartest, most intricate arrangements ever. "I Didn't See It Coming" lives up to its title, quietly slipping in one instrumental detail after another until it's worked itself up into an enormous fugue.
Playing it cool might be the band's strategy with the album in general, too. Write About Love is a grower-- the sort of record you need to play repeatedly, listening to how it fits together, before it can really ingratiate itself. Belle and Sebastian have been making records this good, and very much in this vein, for a long time; the other mistake it's easy to make with them is taking their consistent excellence for granted.
