But as Murdoch admitted in a recent interview, his dalliances with more topical songwriting are on the wane: “I’m no Billy Bragg, that’s for sure,” he quipped. Fittingly, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3 feels insular—it’s more interested in taking you inside its characters’ private lives than exposing them to the outside world. The musical extroversion of recent Belle and Sebastian remains: as “Poor Boy” tries to mend its protagonist’s broken heart with a shoulder-rubbing Tom Tom Club bounce, Sarah Martin wields her gilded disco-diva hook like a dagger. (“Poor boy, I could never live up to your imagination/Poor boy, I was a crush that killed.”) But while Belle and Sebastian have been spending more time on the dancefloor of late, they inevitably retreat to the bedroom. The folksy acoustic serenade “There Is an Everlasting Song” is the sort of rainy-day rumination that would be right at home on If You’re Feeling Sinister, as it twists optimistic affirmations into ominous threats: “There is an everlasting sadness all around/It’s bigger than the news, from this you cannot run/A woman’s magazine, a column in the Mail can’t help you now.”
On early Belle and Sebastian records, Murdoch-sung lullabies like “There Is an Everlasting Song” dominated. Here, it’s a rare moment when his vocals aren’t intertwined with Martin’s, who’s gradually outgrown her auxiliary-singer status to become a defining feature of the band’s sound. At this point, she’s come to represent more than just Murdoch’s foil, but his conscience as well. The first volume of How to Solve Our Human Problems closed with the slackadasical group sing-along “Everything Is Now”—and if it felt like little more than the backing track for an unfinished song, well, that’s because it was. On Pt. 3, we get the vastly superior sequel “Everything Is Now (Part Two),” which uses the original’s gently swaying rhythm as the springboard into an increasingly dramatic orchestro-pop showdown between Murdoch and Martin where they seem to interrogate the very idea of writing about love through a male gaze. “Melody, my greatest friend, be comforted to know I need you more,” Murdoch sings wistfully, to which Martin bluntly retorts: “I am not an idea, I’m not a melody.”
When the How to Solve Our Human Problems series was first announced last fall, Murdoch expressed his desire to shake up Belle and Sebastian’s usual recording and release strategies. But with the band successfully upgrading “Everything Is Now” from its most frivolous song to one of its more probing, you have wonder if they ultimately would’ve been better off whittling down the EPs’ 15 tracks into a tight 10-song album. Like each of the previous installments, Pt. 3 is a hodgepodge of stunning standouts that boldly push the band into new territory, quality comfort-food callbacks to their late-’90s classics, and middling turns that could’ve been easily excised (in this case, “Too Many Tears,” which oversells the ironic distance between its lovelorn lyrics and jubilant jangle-soul arrangement and winds up running in circles). Belle and Sebastian have a history of eagerly welcoming fans into their creative processes, so it only feels right to honor that tradition: We may be no closer to alleviating the collective anxieties chronicled on these EPs, but at least some problems are easier to solve than others.
Tracklist
| A1 | Poor Boy
|
|
| A2 | Everything Is Now (Part Two)
|
|
| B1 | Too Many Tears
|
|
| B2 | There Is An Everlasting Song | |
| B3 | Best Friend
|
