God Help the Girl God Help the Girl. This is not a Belle & Sebastian album. Nope. Ignore those Belle & Sebastian songs that are playing just now. Ignore those familiar photos on the sleeve(note I haven't actually seen these familiar photographs). Ignore those Belle & Sebastian lyrics. No, listen, this is nothing at all like a Belle & Sebastian record! Not really. But that's the story we're meant to digest. First track is a Belle & Sebastian track. Act of the Apostle, well most of Act of the Apostle(reprise) but you see there is an attractive young woman is singing. Not Isobel mind. Isobel doesn't really sing anyhow, so then you already knew this. It's a pretty good opening track. Second song, the title track, I am not convinced that she's such a marvelous voice. I'm also not entirely convinced that this record would not have sounded even lovelier had Stuart Murdoch decided to sing all of the songs. It is his "solo" record after all. It is not a Belle & Sebastian record, no, even though he has written all of the songs. Stuart Murdoch has become a very good singer, he's learned to assume the role of the character and has added some flexibility and soul. This girl is a bit monochromatic. At times the beauty of the arrangements and the pretty string sections make up for this deficiency and sometimes, not really. Here on the title track it sounds a bit like someone dispassionately reciting a grocery list. I don't mean to be mean. Although I am. Always. It's a pretty good song but it might have sounded about the same had Isobel been the singer instead. That's not high praise. Next track. A Stuart track. All strings and piano. It sounds like Divine Comedy circa-Liberation or Promenade which serves as foreshadowing since Neil Divine Comedy appears later on this album. He sings beautifully. He seems engaged. He wrote it. He's not doing Karaoke. I am ugly. I really do enjoy this album. Am I anti-Female? Possibly. But then I don't really interact with females in a male way so I don't think that is it. I am gender neutral. Quiet, tender moments, the female comes in, hmmm...I think I prefer male vocalists overall. Unless the gal is gonna be dramatic and off kilter. I am not much for the crystalline genericist. Very nice, that one. I think the next track was actually the execrable 'jazz' interlude, I've deleted it. Instead it is Hiding Neath My Umbrella. An umbrella would have been a good investment in 2009. It is not normally so, not in Denver, Colorado. Driving along the interstate south towards Castle Rock and the scrub oak is in bloom and it still looks hideous and scabrous but it is genteel silhouettes along emerald hillsides. We're in the semi-arid region, we are surround by opportunists. We are surrounded by hideous Ash trees and only slightly less hideous Lindens and dying Cottonwoods and chlorotic Maples but this year spring has truly sprung and it is marvelous to be alive in this unfamiliar cauldron of life and love. The Magpies are rejoicing. That was a duet, a nice one, she was better on it, she might be better on call and response songs but sadly those are not in the majority. Now a slow basic track. This might serve to further the libretto. I am not paying attention to what the words mean just now. It's a duet with another girl. I don't think I'd like a peak into the world of Stuart Murdoch. Not one where the word 'hipster' is used and not with cringes or shrugs. Where every photograph is a funeral, the life pressed from it when it is pressed into the flicker photo on a Macintosh. Stuart is singing now. This is pretty good. It mgiht serve some alternate purpose. Does it seem like a movie that would be worth seeing seeing as how this is the soundtrack? Not really, no. Next one might not actually be mistaken for a Belle & Sebastian song. It could possibly be mistaken for a Last Shadow Puppets song though. They drank from the same inspiration fount for the strings. It would have been a triumph if all of the songs diverged from the accepted pedagogy as this one has but you know you are who you are. Vocals again are the letdown for when it picks up in intensity it's a turn a bit flubby. Her stilted voice makes the words seem more clumsy than they might have in the gentle rolling lilt of Stuart Murdoch. Chorus is not as Dusty as they hoped for. But I like it. We're all for underachievers being as we belong to all of the same clubs. Not like Brian Deese. He's 31 and he's running General Motors. What is with this toxic addiction to youth in democratic administrations? Obama's speechwriter is 27. I am sure there are loads of staffers under 30 in the White House. The young are silly. They are fools for novelty. Beware. Also, beware the half beard of Mr Deese. It is a post rocker's beard, too lazy either to shave it completely or to see it through to something substantial. it looks like a beard that a Pitchfork reader might sport. Imagine Brian Deese as a lad reading Brent Dicrescenzo's review of Kid A accepting the wizard's cap before filling his Ritalin prescription. We are doomed. The hipster song is playing, it's very good,Neil Hannon is a good singer. It sounds like a Divine Comedy song, mostly down to his voice, and the strings and the fact that it sounds like how a Divine Comedy song might sound. Does 'hipster' have a shelf life in 2009? Somewhere in the mix we escaped the new faux soul version of Funny Little Frog. Thanks be to delete buttons. It's really awful. I know the person who sang it is probably some unknown from Secaucus or Urbana but whatever, it's a chore to listen to and so we've erased it from existence. Ha. Now the single. Come Monday Night. This, has a dreadful video. The video is so Belle & Sebastian precious. Is it because the people who work with Belle & Sebastian expect that they will be wet, fey and twee that most of what is their public presentation is wet, fey and twee or do they decide to make this their public face in band meetings that Brian Deese's beard sits in on? I'd go for the Flannery O'connor grotesque version of life instead. Counter your intuitive inner pansy by presenting things darkly and with humor instead of devoted earnestness. I don't know what I am talking about. I've been listening to the Giorgio Tuma record all day long. It's a magnificent thing. You should buy it and then buy God Help the Girl because Stuart Murdoch probably doesn't need the money. Some pretty and incidental instrumental has passed. Is this the same singer? I don't think so, there's some depth here that is missing from the other songs and that fragile rasp. It is nearly a cappella, naked, tender, quite nice. I sit next to someone I could write songs like this for, only romantic, but I don't speak. Do Belle & Sebastian do romantic? Not really. They inspired this silly overly romanticized following where people have dreams of arms of sex and send in photographs of themselves on toilets and have get togethers with others of like mind. Their fans did more harm to their public image than the band ever did, especially back when they were shy and retiring sorts hectored in their obscurity by Steven Wells. This one has pepped up. I think that this is not the main singer. It's still a bit colorless. It's a lovely song. Imagine if Stuart had sung it. Here it might be true that the demos are better. The sinister list was filled with those snobs who had Lazy Line Painter Jane demos and they would blag about how amazing it was without Monica Queen. But then Monica Queen is a goddess and Ed Whomever isn't. I could be disparaging the wrong person but I believe I remember it being him. I could be wrong. He could be marvelous. He's not Monica Queen. Will Monica Queen release a new record someday? Have you heard the last? Imagine Monica singing these songs, oh just dream. Now back to main singer, more hesitancy. I may be imagining things have gone awry when really it's bloody brilliant. I just think these songs could be songs that swing and flow and with the swinging a bit of root development could be foresworn and great things turned into everyday occurrences but uh no. It's a lovely song. But remember it isn't a Belle & Sebastian song. Although it is, really. It's like the new Haruki Marukami novel not being Haruki Marukami, no no it's the new Max Brod novel. Honest. A sequel to Kingdom of Heaven, Kafka's dendrocytes in the binders glue and Eva Green is nowhere to be seen. Eva Green could be a Tie Stereo werewolf, who could say she wasn't. It is all very top secret. Dion from Godzuki has a blog and it is mostly less readable than this website but he has a lot of time for werewolves and I can appreciate that. Does he play Marumari when he DJ's ah but then those were actual wolves weren't they. He hasn't had much comment on Dave Bing as new Mayor of Detroit or this the last song. A bunch of the girls sing on this one now. They should have gone with the multiple vocalist format on all of the tracks, gone old school His Name is ALive back in the day, before the electric giraffe before the electric bear. Actually it's a bit like a Ladybug Transistor record isn't it? Belle & Sebastian covering Ladybug Transistor. Now he's on about punk rock, does Stuart Murdoch really live in this post idealization world? Where there are hipster sightings, where people hang out to write songs together, where people drink not to get drunk but still to excess and they romanticize punk rock but only that from the likes of Vic Goddard and the Slits? Are we overjoyed at the prospect of a new Slits album? No. I am trying to remember who this sounds like? Tompaulin? Possibly. Wouldn't that be a circle squared. Well then, it's nice enough for a Sunday afternoon someday. Give it to your mother next Mother's Day.