At the beginning of the fourth track on this fourth album from Belbury Poly, an erudite professor type proffers a few words that feel central to its core: "The geography of peace." The sound of The Belbury Tales lies equidistant between those two poles, with the familiar smell of dusty old textbooks and public information films mixed in with a loose, quietly psychedelic feeling. This opening up of the Belbury Poly sound can partly be attributed to founder Jim Jupp welcoming in a couple of guest players on a number of tracks-- Jim Musgrave on drums and Christopher Budd on bass and electric guitar. It feels like a strand picked up from the fissure Jupp sliced open on "Scarlet Ceremony" from 2006's The Owl's Map, where a faint sense of groove was breathed into the astringent Belbury Poly template.
It's a similar action to the overhaul Stereolab took on Emperor Tomato Ketchup, bringing space and depth into their sound through the muted funk of "Metronomic Underground". Here, it helps widen the scope of an act that felt like it was getting backed into a corner on From an Ancient Star in 2009, which was a pleasing but somewhat pro forma exercise in the kind of work we had come to expect from Belbury Poly. Many of the central tenets of the sound remain intact, with Jupp's impressively fussy arrangements the foundation on which he hangs a series of loopy and fascinating musical notions. It's often about finding an unusual sort of proximity in styles, such as the startling introduction of a child’s off-kilter vocal in the standout track "Green Grass Grows", which floats like a spectral presence over analog synth runs that pay tribute to old 1970s station idents.
Naturally, that kind of feeling is something anyone acquainted with Jupp and Julian House's Ghost Box label have come to expect. But most of The Belbury Tales falls shy of creating musical phantasms. Instead, shades of folk-tinged prog acts emerge, particularly those from the Canterbury scene that Jupp confessed to be a fan of in a recent FACT interview. But it's a Belbury-ized interpretation of those works, delivered through a filter of antiquated synths, creepy 1970s horror features, and esoteric library music. The prog influence can be heard seeping through the cracks in "A Pilgrim's Path", which feels like it's one or two chords away from toppling over into the excesses of that genre. But Jupp has a headmasterly way with his music, quickly reining in any signs of disobedience via carefully plotted structures and neatly clipped synth lines, which form like a plume of chalk dust rising from a blackboard eraser slammed hard on an old wooden desk.
That type of reserve Jupp utilizes in Belbury Poly aligns him with a number of English acts well versed in rock history but with a distinctly un-rock approach to the art, who sometimes work in pop or on the fringes of it. Bands that listen to mountains of old psych 7"'s with yellowing sleeves then distill the feeling from them while shearing out all the fatty excess-- the long hair, the flowing tie-dye ponchos, the hoary old guitar solos. Bands like Saint Etienne or House's former collaborators in Broadcast. So on "Now Then", the wildly distorted guitar passages come with a muzzle attached, pushed into the background over loops of the most un-rock instrument of all-- the panpipes. "Chapel Perilous" and "Goat Foot" even threaten to boil over into solid rock grooves, only for Jupp to skillfully pull back by smothering them in great whirls of electronics and processed sound, comfortably anchoring it in Belbury land.
One of the crucial aspects of Belbury Poly is the notion of "building worlds," as Jupp put it in a recent interview with the Wire. But there's always something held back, something not clearly defined, making the listener do the work to fill in the gaps. The Belbury Tales is stranded somewhere between the abstract work of Jupp's past and the fuller sound of the live instrumentation he is applying, making this feel like his most pleasingly open-ended release so far. There's fantastic detail in the packaging, as we've come to expect from Ghost Box, with a short story from Electric Eden author Rob Young decorating the pages of the CD booklet. Even the variations in paper in that booklet-- sleek and soft on the outside, coarse and craggy on the inside-- feels like an aesthetic choice that was labored over for days. That's the world of Belbury Poly, like a meticulous sketch of an old town plan that never got finished, leaving plenty of scope for its creator to pencil in the blanks.
