God Help the Girl
| God Help The Girl | |
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| Studio album by Belle and Sebastian, Catherine Ireton and others | |
| Released | 22 June 2009 |
| Genre | Indie pop, chamber pop, girl group |
| Length | 44:36 |
| Label | Rough Trade Records, Matador |
| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
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| Rockfeedback |
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| Pitchfork Media | (7.5/10) link |
| PopMatters |
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| Stereokill |
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| The Guardian |
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| Mojo | |
| Uncut | |
| The Times |
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| Record Collector |
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| Audio Scribbler |
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| Paste Magazine | (7.7/10) link |
| All Gigs |
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God Help the Girl is a musical project by Stuart Murdoch, leader of the Scottish indie group Belle and Sebastian, featuring a group of female vocalists, including Catherine Ireton, with Belle and Sebastian as the accompanying band. The project has released a self-titled album, an EP and several singles. Central to the project is a musical film, featuring songs from the project's recorded releases. The film was released in 2014.
The songs of the project God Help the Girl belong to the genre of indie pop and resemble the other output of Belle and Sebastian in tone – two songs (Funny Little Frog and Act of the Apostle) were taken directly from the earlier repertory of this group. However, contrary to the earlier work of Belle and Sebastian (a group dominated by male performers), female vocalists (who are not members of the group) play the main role in the project. The songs themselves also tell about the problems of young girls entering adult life.
The author of the project God Help the Girl is Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of the Glasgow-based Scottish indie pop group Belle and Sebastian. In 2004, during a tour promoting their album Dear Catastrophe Waitress, he came up with the idea of writing a series of songs telling about the life of girls and young women which could be sung not by his group but female vocalists. Thinking about this project, he started writing new songs which were shelved for the time being; after some time the idea of arranging them in a logical whole and making a film occurred to him.
Looking for performers for his songs, Murdoch placed an advertisement in a local magazine in Glasgow in 2004. The first vocalists who joined the project were Celia García from Edinburgh, Scotland, who responded to the advertisement placed in the magazine, and Alex Klobouk from Germany, who met Stuart Murdoch on the Dear Catastrophe Waitress tour. Stuart Murdoch also held an open audition on the imeem community portal – the candidates who wanted to work with the group were to send in their demos of two Belle and Sebastian songs: Funny Little Frog and The Psychiatrist Is In. Brittany Stallings and Dina Bankole from the US were chosen out of about 400 applications; in February 2008 they were invited to a trial recording session in Glasgow. Eventually Funny Little Frog was sung in the project by Brittany Stallings, with Dina Bankole performing some of the other pieces.
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Wikipedia