Review: Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Every now and then an album is released that under standard observation would be considered a masterpiece but overshadows itself with one brilliant stand-out track. Belle and Sebastian's latest release, The Life Pursuit, falls victim to this unique conundrum.
There are a number of great achievements on The Life Pursuit including Belle and Sebastian's continued capability to release albums that span various styles of music effortlessly. Here they manage to cross genres from funk/soul on "Song for Sunshine", standard blues grooving on "The Blues are Still Blue" to even some country-twang on the closer "Morning Crescent".
Another strength of this latest release is that it breaks Belle and Sebastian's tradition of releasing albums that tend to lie on the sleepy side. It features a collection of kitchen dance party numbers to be sung to your toaster such as the ironically titled "We Are Sleepyheads" and the 70's sounding jam "For the Price of a Cup of Tea." They even get points for wittingly making "poet" and "throat" rhyme in "Funny Little Frog."
Although despite the overall strength of The Life Pursuit the stand-out track "White Collar Boy" puts the rest of the album to shame. It cleverly pulls out every musical hook available in the Brit-pop catalog while keeping with Belle and Sebastian's nack of writing overly cute lyrics about awkward gender relations as apparent in:
She said “You ain’t ugly, you can kiss me if you like”
Go ahead and kiss her, you don’t know what you’re missing
Provided "White Collar Boy" does not put Belle and Sebastian on the mainstream shelf of one-hit wonders this release should propel them out of their indie-college level status.
Rating: 4/5