Indeed, The Boy With The Arab Strap is the last unequivocally great Belle and Sebastian album (albums one and two, Tigermilk and Sinister, go without saying; Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Child, which came next, has its moments but is ultimately cut of a different cloth altogether, and nothing since then has come near), and also their most prettily, melancholically autumnal. Even its most sprightly numbers - songs like the delightfully skipping "Dirty Dream Number Two" and the positively jaunty title track - are wrapped up in a wistful haze, never mind the actual slow songs (of which "Seymour Stein" is the best); that said, there's a brightness to it, a vibrancy that runs through the whole, from pensive opener "It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career" to the gentle rise and fall of "The Rollercoaster Ride" with which it ends, and a lightness of touch and a knowingness which keeps it all in check.
Along the way are two of the most totemic (for me) individual songs in the band's back catalogue, "Is It Wicked Not To Care?" and "Simple Things", both delicate slices of disaffectedness, but ultimately it's the mood of The Boy With the Arab Strap which lingers rather than individual moments, and which gives the record its lasting effect. In many way, it's an unassuming thing, but I return to it over and over, and when I think about the soundtrack of my last five years or so, this is one which comes very quickly to mind. In rain or in sunshine (or very possibly both at once), this one's a keeper.
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[*] Excluding, that is, their eps, which, with Belle and Sebastian, admittedly means that one is really only telling half the story.
