For many of us millennials, the Glaswegian band’s ninth studio album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, will be their first LP released under our watch. Such a release is an important event for any music fan, a chance to connect with a beloved band in real-time, rather than retrospectively. Unfortunately, for many such Belle and Sebastian fans like me, Girls in Peacetime will also be the band’s first disappointment.
Girls in Peacetime is a pop record. Belle and Sebastian have always based their sound in pleasant pop melodies and simple progressions, but Girls in Peacetime draws its inspiration from a more recent pop tradition than the baroque-inspired sound of their definitive work. One could more accurately characterize the album as an electronic pop record, although this too is not exactly virgin territory for the group. For instance, 1996’s “Electronic Renaissance” experimented with synth textures and electronic beats. They did this again more subtly on their 1998 album, The Boy With The Arab Strap. Still, even on those rather experimental works, Belle and Sebastian preserved their distinctive tenderness: a sense that their songs and the characters within them could fall apart at any time. Not so on Peacetime. Here, garish Eurotrash beats clash with discothèque synthesizers, while Murdoch and assorted guest vocalists strive, hopelessly, to gain some standing amidst this manufactured chaos. “Enter Sylvia Plath” and “Play for Today” are the greatest offenders in this department, and even when the radical aesthetic shift pays off, as on the catchy single “The Party Line,” the band’s identity is lost.
Much of the blame for this can be placed on producer Ben H. Allen, best known for transmuting Animal Collective’s shambolic freak-folk into full-blown synth pop on 2009’s stellar Merriweather Post Pavilion. Allen’s pedigree is impressive, but he’s the wrong fit for Belle and Sebastian, a group that has never been defined by their ambition or their stylistic versatility in the way that an act like Animal Collective has. Rather, Belle and Sebastian works best in humble spaces, with unfussy arrangements that provide room for Murdoch’s delicate voice to breathe. No such space is to be found on this album; even on the tracks without overwhelming electronic elements, orchestral arrangements of layered horns, woodwinds, and strings all but suffocate the fundamentally simple songs underneath.
Unfortunately, the problems with Girls in Peacetime are deeper than the superficial production elements. To say nothing of “Perfect Couples,” the lone song written by guitarist Stevie Jackson, Murdoch’s lyrics on this album have fallen short of the high standard set by the group’s best work. Alternately too aphoristic and too prosaic, Murdoch can’t seem to strike the balance between stargazing romanticism and attentive character craft that the music demands. Murdoch has written openhearted characters before, but the titular “Girls” of Peacetime— frustrated, politically minded, privileged 20-somethings devoid of self-awareness—almost scan as a self-parody of Belle and Sebastian’s canonical character tropes. “When there’s bombs in the Middle East, you want to hurt yourself,” Murdoch sings about the subject of “Allie.” Who’s interested in this person, especially when compared to the expertly rendered main character of If You’re Feeling Sinister’s “Judy and the Dream of Horses”? Allie is a girl who is vaguely upset about strife in the Middle East; this is all we’ll ever know about her.
Elsewhere, Murdoch abandons his characters altogether, opting for a more autobiographical approach—a shift that doesn’t make sense that doesn’t make sense for a songwriter who has built his career around evocative storytelling. Album opener “Nobody’s Empire” is the most exemplary track in this regard; although it checks many of the boxes of a Belle and Sebastian hit, Murdoch’s lyrical narrative about his struggles with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the ’90s just isn’t as compelling as the early songs he crafted during that traumatic period. Ironically, by explicitly telling his own story for once, Murdoch has sacrificed an essential part of his identity as a songwriter: his willingness to reject the temptations of autobiography for the sake of the song.
Above all, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance is a concerning album. It’s concerning in that this was ostensibly the best material that the group could cull together since 2010’s Write About Love. Furthermore, it’s concerning that a band that has been around for nearly 20 years feels so unsure of its sonic identity that they would let their songs be brutally dismembered and aesthetically re-assembled by a producer with whom they had never previously worked. The greatest concern, however, is that Stuart Murdoch will be unable to derive an equally moving, new mode of songwriting as he grows older and more detached from the subjects of his greatest songs. The awkward, decadent mess of Girls in Peacetime offers little hope in that regard, but Murdoch is 46 years old. Perhaps as he continues into middle age, his former genius will reemerge, guiding him on towards untapped songwriting territory. Until then, for listeners of my persuasion, those old mix CDs will have to suffice.