God Help The Girl
- God Help The Girl
- Band Name: God Help The Girl
- Record Label: Matador
- Release Date: Jun 23, 2009
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Ireton’s vocals grow more appealing with each listen, as does the album. Murdoch has created such a lush, cinematic world here that turning Girl into a movie almost feels redundant.
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80Save for a handful of forgettable excursions into tampering with a perfectly good formula, it’s a very well-written, cohesive collection of songs.
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80God Help The Girl has real class. [Jul 2009, p.99]
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80It is the clan's most successful production since 1996's "If You're Feeling Sinister." [Jul 2009, p.88]
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80Virtually every song could fit on to a Belle and Sebastian album. None of which is to suggest it isn't good: the tunes are uniformly fantastic and the arrangements are charming.
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80A highly polished 50s-girl-group sound prevails, bringing out production values that verge on cheesy but also string and vocal arrangements that are impressively, bombastically Bacharach.
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80The musical doesn't begin production until 2010. The time lapse is confusing for listeners of the narrative, which focuses on a young woman named Eve. But Murdoch, who lends his vocals to two of the album's 14 tracks, plays his strengths as the man behind the music.
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80If most B&S records can be considered indie-pop, short-story collections, you might call this a bildungsroman in shorts. And while the pages of this musical story are dog-eared and familiar, as with any favored paperback, that’s just a testament to its continued readability.
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80God Help the Girl, old-fashioned and without artifice though it may be, is supremely welcoming. Its charm--and those tunes!--are likely to make it an album you find yourself returning to, again and again, for the simple joy of listening to it.
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While there are fewer barbs and the atmosphere is less filigreed, as with Belle & Sebastian , you’re either down with the twee or not. Tuneful as this is, it’s hard to write it off without feeling like a rockist grinch.
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75God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting--set to start next year--we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story.
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Murdoch's new muse, Catherine Ireton, lends her ingenue vocals to nearly every track,? and while her style seems better suited to the stage, the album dips and? twirls along, like some lost '60s musical excavated from its sweet celluloid slumber.
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70Murdoch pipes up now and again, but he's mostly content to play puppet master in his own lushpop cabaret and revel in the fact that he only has to write and produce these brilliantly classic sounding songs, and not warble them.
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It just simply seems that Stuart Murdoch isn’t a very portable songwriter: he may be able to write Stuart Murdoch songs for Stuart Murdoch, but translated to anything but his music frequently exhibits its participants’ weaknesses, and the end result is unsettling and unfulfilling like few Belle and Sebastian products are.
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God Help the Girl should probably just be viewed as a flawed work or a semi-successful adventure by a solo artist who needs his band to be truly great.
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60Pretty but inessential, God Help The Girl may make more sense when the film is finally delivered next year. Up until then this is largely of interest to Belle & Sebastian completists.
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60This remains, however, a good album, and another triumph for Stuart Murdoch.
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For now, this ambitious album sadly slots into the "for completists only" compartment of Murdoch's nearly unimpeachable discography. [Summer 2009, p.66]
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Ireton’s voice has an unschooled grace which elevates ‘Hiding Neath My Umbrella’ to the status of an interesting, if flimsy, curio in Murdoch’s canon. It’s just a shame the rest of the record, and the new recruits, are so fucking woeful.
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johnL9Beautiful, it has really grown on me. Not really a bad song and several great tracks.