{"id":3880,"date":"2015-02-03T19:20:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T00:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=3880"},"modified":"2015-02-03T19:20:07","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T00:20:07","slug":"girls-in-peacetime-want-to-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/03\/girls-in-peacetime-want-to-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance."},"content":{"rendered":"

Is there anything quite so Belle & Sebastian as a song titled \u201cEnter Sylvia Plath?\u201d The veteran Scottish indie-folk-rock-whatever group, known as much for their low profile as for their music, have always enjoyed great critical acclaim but never much commercial success, which I believe is the result of their refusal to sound un-British and their use of song titles and lyrics that range from abstruse to sinister, too cerebral for mass appeal even though much of their music is blatantly pop in nature. They’ve had a few gold records in the UK, but have had very little sales traction outside of Britain, not even in Australia, often the most receptive market for distinctly British acts.<\/p>\n

\u201cEnter Sylvia Plath\u201d encapsulates the paradox of B&S, as it’s a 131 bpm electronic dance song that name-drops a poet\/author who produced depressing material that matched her tragic biography. It’s part of the soft middle of the band’s new album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, their first since 2010’s quiet, underappreciated Write About Love<\/i>. The new album kicks off with a quartet of effusive pop songs that would fit as well on any pop\/top 40 station as on independent or alternative radio, including the lead single \u201cThe Party Line\u201d (#3 on my list of the top songs of 2014<\/a>), enough to buoy almost any album on to a year-end best-of list. Beyond the initial promise the boys (and girl) can’t sustain the energy that drove the opening chapter, with music that’s more pleasant background listening rather than the hook-laden stuff that demands your full attention, more intriguing lyrically than musically.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Ah, but that opening tetrad is something else. \u201cNobody’s Empire\u201d begins with a swirling piano riff and softly thumping bass drum before lead singer\/songwriter Stuart Murdoch introduces a sunny melody that goes back to 1960s pop, belying the lyrics describing Murdoch’s own experiences with the debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, along with the first of many wonderful quotes from the record \u2013 \u201cMarching with the crowd singing dirty and loud\/For the people’s emancipation\u201d (Shouldn’t all protest songs be dirty and loud?) \u201cAllie\u201d plays like a sly, sinister detective story describing a woman fighting some kind of mental illness that puts her through delusions and desires for self-harm, over the album’s best hook, a shuffling minor-chord blues pattern that refuses to let you catch your balance any more than the song’s subject can. \u201cThe Party Line\u201d might be the best pure pop song Belle & Sebastian have ever recorded, replete with Murdoch’s typical wordplay (he’s calling you to the dance floor more than to a partisan debate). \u201cThe Power of Three\u201d at least starts to downshift the listener before the softer middle third of the album, moving towards a glammier ’70s vibe with the tinny synth riff that powers the bridges after each chorus, although by the end of its four minutes they’ve dissipated much of the energy that powered the first trio of tracks.<\/p>\n

The middle of the album drags both due to the drop in tempo and the length of several of its songs, with \u201cThe Cat with the Cream\u201d a sedative to bring everyone down from the high of the start of the album, leading into \u201cEnter Sylvia Plath\u201d almost with a whisper. \u201cThe Everlasting Muse\u201d dips into a musical allusion to Russian folk dances for an incongruous middle movement, certainly true to the band’s roots in folk music but less subtle than their best work. The pace doesn’t pick back up until the seven-minute opus \u201cPlay for Today,\u201d featuring Dum Dum Girls singer\/songwriter Dee Dee Penny sharing vocal duties with Murdoch in a song laced with mid-80s new wave trappings that seems to run far shorter than its actual length thanks to the shared vocal duties. That song sets up \u201cThe Book of You,\u201d with Sarah Martin taking over lead vocals on another banger that builds up to an old-fashioned rock guitar solo, but the newfound momentum collapses with the dirge-like closer \u201cToday (This Army’s for Peace.\u201d <\/p>\n

For a band that’s been around for nearly twenty years now, releasing nine albums, Belle & Sebastian manage to sound new at several points on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance<\/a><\/i>, never more so than when they live up the album’s title by producing songs that combine great hooks with beats and rhythms suited for the dance floor. The album is surprisingly incoherent for a group whose songwriting and production always feel so meticulous, almost like it’s two half-albums mashed together without a thought to sequencing. The portion that finds Belle & Sebastian feeling the urge to get up and dance is the revelation here, a new dimension from a group that, while talented, seemed to have fallen into its own set ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is there anything quite so Belle & Sebastian as a song titled \u201cEnter Sylvia Plath?\u201d The veteran Scottish indie-folk-rock-whatever group, known as much for their low profile as for their music, have always enjoyed great critical acclaim but never much commercial success, which I believe is the result of their refusal to sound un-British and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[803,359,748,852],"class_list":["post-3880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2015-in-music","tag-alternative","tag-british-music","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3880"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3882,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880\/revisions\/3882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}