In the spring of this year it was beginning to look for all intents and purposes like the sun was setting on the autumn of Belle & Sebastian’s necessity. For that was when The Hidden Cameras ceremonially crossed the Atlantic in Y-fronts and balaclavas to snatch the Glaswegian’s presumably safe twee-indie crown with a determined and effortless superiority. And it wasn’t only that their songs gushed out with an inherently religious twinkle, but also that there just seemed to be more of a point to the gay Canadians. With all of his cod-intellectual, self-aggrandising smugness, decreasingly-magical sets of songs and continued refusal to be anything but elusive to his fanbase, Stuart Murdoch didn’t do himself any real favours either. Such cod-intellectuality doth not necessarily an enigmatic artistic deity make.
But it would seem the way to claw your crown back, or prise a couple of the more attractive encrusted jewels off, is to sign to the same label as your challenger and then release a set of image-betraying, outwardly-sparkling pop songs. Not that every last characteristic has changed, far from it, most have stayed exactly the same. They remain crafty and subtle. But no more do they rely on one-on-one subdued musical monologues (regardless of the mood or personnel involved, things always retained an air of selective intimacy behind closed doors). From the perky wind-instrument introduction of the utterly daft ‘Step Into My Office, Baby’ this marks itself out as an album of attention-grabbing beat performances. The drums are practically wearing a polka-dot dress and doing the 2-step on Top of the Pops in ’65.
To begin with, such extroverted behaviour fits like a satchel with the strap on the wrong notch. It just hangs all, well, wrong. But could it be that we’ve been mistaken, that they’ve grown, and the strap fits just fine, actually? You get the feeling that if you were in the room this time there’d be eye-contact, and possibly more. The slight song-writing lull of ‘Fold Your Arms…’ has been reversed, ‘Wrapped Up In Books’ and ‘Lord Anthony’ being two of the prettiest they’ve laid down since those do-no-wrong early days. ‘If You Find Yourself Caught In Love’ and the title track feed off an exuberance that ‘Legal Man’ started but ‘Fold…’ didn’t quite follow. And final track ‘Stay Loose’ goes so far as extend its influences, adding Doors-y Hammond to reggae guitar and Kraut-pop minimalism, brilliantly. Turning it around in the nick of time, typically out of season, they now enter the winter of their content.