Albums of the Year # 101 Belle & Sebastian - Late Developers

 

Late Developers? Arrested Development more like. Belle & Sebastian kick off their fourth decade of  making records and performing on the circuit, in rude health. Late Developers their twelfth studio album, and second within the calendar year, finds them kicking indie ass, though this certainly isn't quite as noteworthy as last year's A Bit of Previous.

With B&S you've known pretty much what you were getting since about 2003. They'd pretty much written their memoirs by then and you were never going to hear their Grime or Remix albums  . Their stall had been laid out and it was all as white as white sliced from now on. The last two years of secondary school relived in different ways, Singalong early Seventies Pop, rewind to Left Banke and Love in '67, fast forward to Orange Juice, Smiths and Felt in the indie Eighties. The Glasgow equivalent of Grange Hill. It wasn't broke so why fix it. From Dear Catastrophe Waitress onwards Murdoch and co. generally turned up every three or four years with a set of tunes that were the equals, or near equals or just echoes of the stunners that reinvented the Indie wheel so fabulously in the mid-Nineties.

 Late Developers is a cool new chapter of their story. As with all things B&S, it's incredibly knowing/ They were always Post Modernist Pop classicists, ridiculously self-aware and arch, too cool for school. This basic character trait hardens if anything as they make their way through middle age. This time they set their sights for the most part on Singalong Seventies Pop.  Airport by Motors was always a favourite of Murdoch's and it feels pretty much the template for much of what's going on here.

I've got a lot of time for Singalong Seventies Pop having experienced it myself first time round. There's very little Postcard Records or Smiths going down here. So none of the darkness of those adolescent years that B&S shone a slightly cruel spotlight on in their early years. The sense that regardless of how carefree it all felt on the surface there was a sense that genuine darkness lurked and if you weren't led astray by someone you shouldn't be hanging round with, you might even actually fail altogether. Murdoch don't forget was waylaid by chronic fatigue syndrome while at university and will always be transfixed by the experience to a lesser or greater degree. Usually a greater one. 

So Belle & Sebastian in nostalgic party mode this time round. It's a good B &S record, but not a great one like with A Bit of Previous I'd say. But class is permanent and B&S and Murdoch remain class. They could easily have built a second career for themselves writing mainstream Pop hits for the actual charts. Instead they remain in the place they first emerged from. Nowt wrong with that with them. Another snapshot of the time and place where Gregory Underwood is forever slinking across the playground after Nine at that Abronhill Secondary School, trying to escape the attention of the teachers in the staffroom, daydreaming about the pretty girls in his chemistry class..