Belle and Sebastian are headed back to Japan, but are not quite as you remember them. For nearly 20 years the Glasgow indie darlings have been pigeonholed as producers of twee, lovelorn songs for corduroy-clad outcasts, but with their newly released ninth album, that stereotype is in danger of looking outdated: "Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance" is as concerned with the dance floor as it is the state of the world in which it was conceived.
The quaint charm and quirky tunes that have wooed a community of loyal devotees remain in place, but this time they are augmented by a preoccupation with world events and expansive synth-pop that wants to move your feet as well as your heart. At times, like on "Enter Sylvia Plath," the music has more in common with Scandinavian Europop than acoustic ballads about foxes in the snow, but it still retains Belle and Sebastian's very essence: Plath is a dead poet, after all.
Speaking from Glasgow, keyboardist Chris Geddes, whose instrumentation has been unexpectedly pushed to the foreground, says that the "songs dictated the way the music went rather than any preconceived ideas about the style we wanted." In other words, this was not a deliberate attempt by singer-songwriter and band leader Stuart Murdoch to finally shake off the twee tag.