Boy With the Arab Strap [Import, Limited Edition]

This highly anticipated album from Belle and Sebastian arrives with every hope satisfied. Each song is a cunning short story that wraps itself around you like a cozy couch throw. The loose theme running through this 12-song reverie is seduction. It plays out in both the drowsy sexual hopes of principal songwriter Stuart Murdoch's idle protagonists and the giddiness of bandmate Stevie Jackson's "Seymour Stein" and "Chickfactor," which document his bewitchment by the city of New York and its beautiful girls and florid pitchmen. The complex arrangements favor a whimsical diversity best experienced in "Sleep the Clock Around," which features synthesizer bloops, trumpets, and bagpipes! If you haven't figured out that this Scottish eight-piece deserves every iota of hype it's receiving, it's time to have your ears checked and your record collection gone over by a certified professional. --Lois Maffeo

Belle and Sebastian follow up the considerable promise of 1997's fantastic If You're Feeling Sinister with an album that is, unbelievably, even better. The Boy with the Arab Strap is an immediately infectious and delicious pastiche of fey, Nick Drake-ian vocals; lilting pop melodies; shimmery arrangements; croony wonder; and tortured, lit-smart lyrics. Belle and Sebastian are smarter than the Smiths, wittier than the Beach Boys, more fun than the Velvet Underground, and even more inscrutable than R.E.M. That's heavy company, but The Boy with the Arab Strap proves they deserve to be belles of the ball. --Tod Nelson

[Singer-songwriter Stuart] Murdoch can apparently make a witty yet heartfelt song out of anything that crosses his mind...

The quiet power of this nuanced, restrained pop foray derives from a sly contradiction: An exterior of breezy pop melodies, tidy arrangements and fragile vocals belies the darkness within.

Japanese reissue of the Scottish indie act's 1998 album, packaged in a limited edition miniature LP sleeve. EMI. 2003.