God Help The Girl - God Help The Girl
User Score
8.4 out of 10

Universal acclaim- based on 8 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 8
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 8
  3. Negative: 1 out of 8

Review this album

  1. Your Score
    10 out of 10
    Rate this:
    out of 10
  1. Submit
  2. Check Spelling
  3. Characters remaining: 5000 out of 5000

  1. johnL
    Aug 15, 2009
    9
    Beautiful, it has really grown on me. Not really a bad song and several great tracks.
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  2. ChristianT
    Jul 21, 2009
    3
    I am a massive B&S fan, but gave this one listen and put it on the junk pile. There are maybe three listenable tracks and two of them are recycled from B&S' last release. The rest of it is quite bizarre and sometimes downright unsettling. Murdoch clearly needs the rest of the band to keep him from going bonkers.
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  3. Sjoerdd
    Jul 21, 2009
    9
    I really love the album. It is simply a Belle and Sebastian album with a different perspective and realization. The songs are very good and depict the story nicely. The singers have been chosen very well, and it just get more appealing with every listen.
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  4. OttoD
    Aug 13, 2009
    10
    Really the best album I've bought in years. Beautifully naive music.
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  5. Oct 15, 2010
    10
    This is a fabulous album containing beautiful pop songs. It's not a 'flawed work' at all but a fully realised work that sounds hauntingly familiar yet new simultaneously. I can't recommend it highly enough and it's rarely been off my CD player since I bought it. I would like to hear much more from Mr Murdoch and his collaborators.
Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 19 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 19
  2. Negative: 1 out of 19
  1. 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.
  2. If 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.
  3. 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.