Cuddly Scots Belle and Sebastian don’t have much in common with shirtless American funk jocks the Red Hot Chili Peppers, aside from both bands’ decisions to recently release two albums just months apart. A Bit of Previous was the first Belle and Sebastian studio album for seven years last May, and at the start of this week they jumped out from behind the sofa again with the surprise announcement that they’ve done another one.
As with the Chili Peppers’ Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen last year, the second batch of songs was recorded in the same sessions as the first. The close connection is made still clearer by the album cover, which shows somebody developing a photograph of the cover of A Bit of Previous.
However, that doesn’t necessarily make these new compositions yesterday’s leftovers. Rather it allows the long-running band to continue pushing at the edges of the warmhearted indie folk sound they’ve been making since the mid-Nineties, with some music that strays from their well-used blueprint. These songs don’t hang particularly well together as an album to digest in one sitting, but they grab attention thanks to a number of oddities.
The biggest shock is the single I Don’t Know What You See In Me, which chucks the acoustic guitars in favour of spacey synths, vocal effects and a chorus so smilingly catchy it sounds like they could be thinking of following John Lydon to the Eurovision song contest. It’s an outlier as the band’s first ever co-write with another artist, the Scottish pop producer Peter “Wuh Oh” Ferguson.
“All music is escape, and perhaps we managed to escape a little further than usual with this unexpected tune,” main songwriter Stuart Murdoch has said. Another less-frequent writer, guitarist Stevie Jackson, also sticks out here thanks to the most energetic song: the racing, breathless So In the Moment.
At times the tweeness is likely to send even casual fans screaming for the hills. Will I Tell You a Secret brings an unnecessary harpsichord into proceedings, the carnival feel of the title track sounds like something off kids’ telly, while When The Cynics Stare Back From The Wall, a rediscovered song from the Nineties, actually produces “a puppy with a broken leg”.
But they still charm in large measures, and the fact that they can keep things interesting this far into their lifespan is perhaps the biggest surprise of all.
