Music review: Belle and Sebastian

Jay Richardson finds frontman Stuart Murdoch in puckish form as Belle and Sebastian make the world stop with deep cuts from their back catalogue

Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch

Belle and Sebastian, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ****

A combination of successive live postponements and a couple of surprise, stylistically diverse but generally great albums in recent years, made this belated appearance from Belle and Sebastian highly anticipated, with a palpable charge in the Usher Hall beforehand.

Keen to remind everyone that they wrote the swirly, danceable I Want the World to Stop many years before the pandemic, the Glaswegian outfit's frontman Stuart Murdoch was on puckish form – his recent health issues seemingly put to one side as he zipped a scooter around the stage during the slinky, funky disco oddity of Your Cover’s Blown, one of several rare cuts given an airing from the back catalogue tonight. Similarly, the folky, adolescent nostalgia of We Rule The School and the deft, melodic melancholy of Chickfactor got a run out, the latter featuring guitarist Stevie Jackson on moody vocals.

Of the new songs, soft, poppy feminist tune Reclaim The Night shares some of its darkness, with multi-instrumentalist Sarah Martin singing with potent feeling, while the measured soulfulness of If They're Shooting At You nods to the conflict in Ukraine in a way that eschews gaucheness.

Jackson once again takes the mic on one of the most straightforwardly appealing sung numbers of his career, the joyously energetic So In The Moment, with the rest of the band purring around him like a finely tuned engine. Give A Little Time meanwhile, reimagines Martin as a sixties girl band singer, enveloped in triumphant trumpet majesty.

Typically, indie anthem The Boy With the Arab Strap saw Murdoch inviting a limited number of fans on stage to dance around the band. And they closed with the unrestrainedly rocking, throbbing bass line of Lazy Line Painter Jane and its somewhat unsettling evocation of the last bus home.