Their next step was to release The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998) which many people regard as their finest record. Many people are wrong, it's the first clear sign of rot setting in. In a bid to be more democratic (and in fact more likely demonstrating that Stuart Murdoch's songwriting well was already running dry) all the band members get a turn at either contributing a song or a vocal performance. What results is an album with a few of Murdoch's songs which are not nearly as strong as anything he'd written for the previous two albums, and a bunch of songs that are considerably worse. Isobel Campbell's 'Is It Wicked Not to Care' is a pale version of a B&S song, and I can't help but think that the pitchfork reviewer who described The Boy With the Arab Strap as a parody of a B&S album might have had a point. It's still all in all a relatively charming record, but the coherence and the confidence have dissipated. If it had been their first album you could expect great things in the future. The fact that it's their third portends ill fortune ahead and this is lived out by Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (2000) which is as anaemic a record as the band would ever make. It's not their worst album (that sadly is yet to come) but it's a limping, wounded and joyless version of the band that we'd come to love. If anything the astonishing brilliancy of the representation of the daydream romance of youth, of life, which the first two albums made so palpable, is precisely what's missing by this point - these records now sound like just a band making various brands of sappy indie music. It's as if Belle & Sebastian had become a testing ground for each member's own ambitions and the resultant album is a mess, most perfectly exemplified by the genuinely harrowing story of a rape in 'The Chalet Lines' being followed by the mock-jaunty 'Nice Day for a Sulk'. Even the band knew things weren't right though and by the time the next album appeared two founding members, Isobel Campbell and Stuart David, were gone leaving Murdoch and a selection of other sympathetic minds to carry on.
The next move was to hire 80's uber-producer Trevor Horn to sit behind the desk. Now, bearing in mind Horn's most recent (pet) project was Russian pretend lesbian pop disaster Tatu, it seems like a strange choice. The official critical line goes that it was an inspired choice, reinvigorating a flagging B&S. I suspect that the truth of the matter is that it was an expedient choice aimed at producing a high gloss record to capitalise on the band's surprisingly popularity at the time. The album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003) isn't very good. Once again, we have Murdoch on coasting form and despite apparently doing the lion's share of the work, he hasn't managed to get his muse back. One suspects that Campbell had a lot to do with his focus and once they fell out he found it more difficult to get his song on, and once she actually left the band altogether he had lost his driving force entirely. In any event, despite its high production values, Dear Catastrophe Waitress is just another album by a once-great band. The whole thing starts with a limp, and rather irritating, 60's pastiche in 'Step Into My Office, Baby' and it scarcely improves from there. Murdoch has apparently commented on the fact that although he acknowledges that the songs on If You're Feeling Sinister are the best he's written, he thinks they're badly recorded. This is telling because it implies that what he really would have wanted was for Sinister to be recorded like Waitress, and if that had happened then Sinister wouldn't have been the great album it is. Like Liz Phair's astonishing debut album, you can't help but think in light of how things developed, that these early records are fantastic more by accident than design. There are still some lovely songs, as there are on all B&S albums, and all this slagging off is relative - they've never made a truly bad album as such, but with each successive release you feel they should have stopped with the one before.
Until Dear Catastrophe Waitress Belle & Sebastian didn't release singles from albums but instead released 3 and 4 track EPs with all non-album tracks, and most of them were great. 2005 gave us the chance to remember what B&S had once been with the release of Push Barman To Open Old Wounds, which is a compilation of every one of those EPs released between 1997 - 2001. The earliest of these EPs is an absolute joy, the first, Dog on Wheels (1997) is four songs of lo-fi, high ambition brilliance. By the way, can you believe I had all of these records indivually, bought as and when they were released and then sold the lot to make space? Quite the mistake I can tell you, I really wish I still had them. Anyway, the second EP, Lazy Line Painter Jane is a bit more dicey because it features the ghastly screeching vocals of Monica Queen and a rather aggressive hammond organ - but the other three songs from that EP are fabulous, especially 'You Made Me Forget My Dreams'. Then it's the best of the three first EPs, 3..6..9..Second of Light (1997) which is absolutely great, all four songs are some of the best B&S ever recorded and 'A Century of Fakers' is a real career highlight. In many ways it's worth seeing these three EPs from 1997 collectively as the fabulous third album before the downward turn of The Boy With the Arab Strap. 1998's This is Just a Modern Rock Song is also really great, four more top-flight songs, and a decent coda to Arab Strap. Then things go a bit awry with the Legal Man, Jonathan David and I'm Waking Up To Us 3-song singles. There are lovely tunes in amongst this final lot, but on the whole you can hear the band coming apart in microcosm on the singles, just as it's crystal clear on album. Never mind though, because taken as a whole, Push Barman is an uplifting reminder of greatness.
But don't let the euphoria fool you, the worst comedown follows hard on its heels. The Life Pursuit (2006) is, in relative terms, just awful. At a casual listen The Life Pursuit is a jaunty, cheerful set of nice pop songs that have a bounce and a spring in their step. But closer inspection reveals some dreadfully badly written songs that have only a half-hearted nod towards anything other than trying out new styles. That wouldn't necessarily be in any way a bad thing, if it didn't show just how terribly, terribly limited the Belle & Sebastian pallette is. To be able to make consistently interesting pictures with only two colours is far better than making consistently terrible pictures with twenty colours but clearly Murdoch felt that he was limiting himself rather than simply limited. This is a record with flanged guitar solos (the truly dire 'We Are the Sleepyheads' which is far and away the worst thing they've ever recorded), Stevie Wonder style Hammond organs (the depressingly pointless Roy Ayers styled 'Song for Sunshine'), some of the most transparently audience baiting song titles ('Sukie in the Graveyard') and the whole thing smacks of a bad comedy sketch show's parody of Belle & Sebastian. Bearing in mind that the best song here is also the closest to the old sound of the band ('Act of the Apostle') and that it makes two appearances on the album, you know just how dud the whole thing is. This is truly the joke version of the band that Arab Strap-era B&S was accused of being. The fact that he's revisited 'Funny Little Frog' suggests that even he knows that his best at this point is considerably worse than his worst ten years before. To put the album on when the sun's out and you don't care what it sounds like as long as it's fun then The Life Pursuit is fine. If you want to listen to a good record, avoid at all costs. It's just such a shame.
See you tomorrow for our final B&S session, which thankfully takes us back in time again. Then it's Belly and, eh? what's this? Uh? GEORGE BENSON????!! NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
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