Belle And Sebastian have, for half a decade now, lurched between crises of identity and bouts of debilitating smugness. The former cast a deathly pall over what should have been the doe-eyed Glasweigans' break-out record, 2000’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant; the latter left its jammy prints across the faux-jaunty Dear Catastrophe Waitress.
Recently, Stuart Murdoch, B&S frontman and chief songwriter, appears to have realised that the things he has been looking for – artistic truth, a reason for continuing – were right in front of him all along.
Hence, The Life Pursuit, which not only is closest in spirit to the LP fans have come to look on as definitive, 1998’s The Boy With The Arab Strap, but is also perhaps their best to date.
The problem is that, as Belle And Sebastian, begin a two night, sold-out run at The Ambassador, the album has not yet been released. A clutch of journalists and downloaders aside, not many are in on the secret.
Rather than forcing the new stuff on the audience, B&S, swollen to nearly a dozen thanks to a string section, do something sweet and a little unexpected. They deliver a scattershot ‘best of’ set that finds room for several forgotten triumphs as well as favourites that, it is clear, continue to haunt the group no less than the fanbase.
For anyone with even a passing fondness for B&S, it adds up to a slice of bedsit heaven. The evening opens with ‘I Fought In A War’, the poetic statement of intent that the rest of Fold Your Hands... could not live up to.
Later, we get ‘Jonathan David’, performed exultantly by guitarist Steve Jackson; the chintzy Kraftwerk hum of ‘Electronic Renaissance’ and, before the encore, a glumly dreamy ‘State I Am In’. The last, especially, demonstrates Murdoch's particular knack for seeing the devastating in the mundane; he has a novelist's gaze and a poet's way with a wrenching couplet.
Of The Boy With The Arab Strap there is not a murmur. Perhaps Belle And Sebastian cannot find it within themselves to embrace songs that still cast a shadow. They worry needlessly; two of the night’s best tracks, ‘Funny Little Frog’ and ‘To Me Myself Completely’, featuring a sparkling back and forth between Murdoch and Jackson, are from The Life Pursuit.
Murdoch, who has, it seems, forgotten how to mooch and cannot stop dancing, is a jokey, irreverent frontman. Is this the same person that, on the band’s last stand-alone show in Ireland, smashed a guitar during a stroppy encore? Early on Murdoch jokes about the incident; he can hardly believe it happened either.