Belle and Sebastian’s new album is full of references to aging, parenting, and nostalgia for youth, but also to some new orientation to life, one that takes its finitude a touch more seriously.
, the front man of the Scottish band Belle and Sebastian, sings on “Young and Stupid,” the jaunty opening track of its new album, “A Bit of Previous.” The lyric feels less like a resigned lament than a jubilant mission statement—a declaration that it’s possible for a band widely associated with youthful languor to successfully train its sensibilities on the indignities and forced epiphanies of middle age.
Since “The Boy with the Arab Strap,” the band—minus a few original members, plus a few new ones—has released six proper studio albums, alongside various EPs, film soundtracks, and collaborations. Listening in chronological order, you hear the arrangements growing more ambitious, the production acquiring more layers of polish. More pop flavors show up, and dashes of disco, too.
Anyway, it’s the artist’s job to move on. You can’t be an alienated semi-adult forever, and it’s silly to pretend that you’re one when you’re not. In one of my favorite Belle and Sebastian songs of the past decade, “Nobody’s Empire,” from 2015’s “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance,” Murdoch describes what sounds like a protracted bout of illness.
On “A Bit of Previous,” this version of the band comes to the forefront. There are lyrics about the stressful press of accumulating obligation; about reaching out to old flames, or old almost-flames; about wondering whether you’d do it all differently, given the chance; about feeling overwhelmed by the suffering of the world and trying to keep going anyway; about kids and dogs and “getting through the nightly slog.
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