Album Review by Dave Blair
It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since Glasgow’s Belle and Sebastian broke into alternative music scene consciousness with THE STATE THAT I AM IN. Four subsequent albums rammed with fey-pop classics have earned them an enthusiastic cult following in the UK and won over an unlikely fan in US film director Todd Solondz, hence STORYTELLING, soundtrack to the eponymous movie.
Opening with a series of gentle instrumentals, the appearance of singer Stevie Jackson’s voice at the record’s mid-point marks the return of the familiar B&S sound – soft acoustic guitars, complemented by quirky melodies. Something isn’t quite right here, however. The instrumentals feel like album-filler material, and it would be nice to hear more of co-singer Isobel Campbell, but what really disappoints about STORYTELLING is that the songs never quite burst into life. While pleasant and listenable, there’s no sign of the sublime lyrics and killer melodies that feature so prolifically in the B&S back catalogue. The only outstanding track is FICTION REPRISE, a delightful piano-based instrumental that threatens to break into a WE RULE THE SCHOOL-style B&S classic, but doesn’t quite make it.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that STORYTELLING was doomed from conception: it just sounds like a contrived movie soundtrack. The songs are interspersed with irritating dialogue from the film, the tracks sound rushed, and – as Stevie Jackson conceded in the sleeve notes – there’s something horribly cheesy about writing song lyrics just to tie in with the scenes from a film. I DON’T LIKE FOOTBALL is a woeful example. Locking a band away in a studio with the premise, “Make music that will sound good in this film” is never going to result in a good LP, and so here we have the first blot on the B&S copybook.
