January 29, 2018

This New Belle and Sebastian Album Promises to Solve All Your Problems

The band’s sparkling songs range from peppy dance grooves to fuzzy faux psychedelia.

Album Review

Belle and Sebastian
How to Solve Our Human Problems
Matador

For more than two decades, Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian has championed the virtues of old-fashioned pop music, crafting gorgeous, compassionate tunes that balance heartbreak and hope without descending to sentimental mush. Echoing a trio of their releases from the ’90s, How to Solve Our Human Problems is a series of three five-song EPs the group began issuing on a monthly basis starting in December, with all 15 tracks to be compiled for a proper album this February. As always, leader Stuart Murdoch and company incorporate a deceptively wide range of sounds into their sparkling songs, from peppy dance grooves to fuzzy faux psychedelia to embellishments like brass and pedal steel. Every track features memorable touches: “Poor Boy,” for example, deftly draws on the interplay between the vocals of Murdoch and Sarah Martin in an intriguing vignette about the clash between romantic fantasy and cold reality. A balm for the daily blahs, How to Solve Our Human Problems feels both timeless and remarkably fresh.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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