After I was given a cassette copy of If You’re Feeling Sinister in 1996 by a workmate in the supermarket where I stacked shelves, I became a confirmed and committed fan of Belle & Sebastian. This was not an especially unimaginable occurrance: certainly in an environment which seemed to echo some of their great early songs (unfulfilling work in retail: check; frustrated love life; check: marginal existence somewhere in the arse end of Scotland: check; literary pretensions: check; propensity for making lists using unnecessarily complicated punctuation: check). Being a fan of the group also satisfied the collector that lurks inside every indie fanboy: 3^rd LP The Boy with the Arab Strap was presaged by a CD release of the hitherto impossible to find Tigermilk, and there were the EPs to collect (and once you had those, you could even buy a cardboard slipcase for your copies!).

Belle & Sebastian’s music captured feelings of otherness and strangeness and Stuart Murdoch and company’s writing articulated things that seemed to be beyond the ken of most other bands. And the group’s resistance to the usual grind of pop muzak promotion, interviews and release schedule meant that liking Belle & Sebastian felt like being a part of a super secret cabal – in which the connection was a shared love for the music of Murdoch & Co. It was a great guerrilla action when B&S fans managed to vote for the band as Best Newcomer at the 1999 BRIT Awards, to accusations of vote rigging from Pete Waterman and much to the consternation of Steps, 5ive and the tasteless idiots at the currant bun.

Of course, at the time I also spectacularly missed the point that this was a shared experience and one of Belle & Sebastians’ great strengths is their ability to capture a certain type of universality. Well, I got there in the end.

I say all this not because my personal biography is important to whether or not Belle & Sebastian have produced a good record with their latest (short version: they have), but because one thing that I think has always marked out Belle and Sebastian has been the way their music is something that has been very personal to their fans and listeners. Yes, they get more radio and TV coverage these days, but what they do is best described as affecting at an intimate and personally engaging level.

And now they’re here with their eighth studio album after a journey which has seen them go from little known but beloved indie darlings to still-beloved elder statesmen and women of the music world. Just what has …Write About Love brought us?

An admission: when I first heard this record was to be titled …Write about love, I was worried by the tweeness of the name. Now a Belle & Sebastian fan concerned about tweeness is probably like a fish being worried that the sea is wet: but we’ve all heard Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, and no matter how much we reassure it that we still love it, I’m pretty sure not many of us want a reprise of the musical style on that record.

I was also concerned by the news that Radio 2 favourite and all round queen of snooze Norah Jones would be guesting (what about Monica Queen, hmm!?). But within the first moments of “I Didn’t See it Coming” my concerns were dispelled with the sounds of the Belles cooing “Forget about it honey” accompanied by a gorgeous guitar twang. It’s as if we’re to forget any concerns we might have that they could let us down: and then the song takes a turn from its insistent shuffle to an electronica-infused (I’d say fuelled, but it doesn’t quite get that far: this is no “Electronic Renaissance”) and reverb drenched blast of vocals and wurlitzeresque organs. As a statement of intent “I Didn’t See it Coming” lets us know that …Write About Love isn’t going to disappoint: “You make me dance I want to surrender” sings Murdoch in refrain, and by this point I’d say that I was already surrendering to the record.

There’s a definite lineage here that began with Dear Catastrophe Waitress and carried on through The Life Pursuit. The group have retained the strong pop sensibility that has been in the ascendant over the last few records; and if it’s possible for Stuart Murdoch and B&S to assume a rockstar swagger, then that’s what this record – evidenced by “Come on Sister” – has in abundance. A slightly mincing rockstar swagger to be sure, but it’s definitely there.

Although there has always been a “pop” undercurrent to Belle & Sebastian, it might be argued that the trajectory of the last few LPs has lost some of the subtlty of their earlier work. Things are definitely reaching a level of slick production which elides the sense that Belle & Sebastian and their music are ramshackle and things are about to fly apart at any moment. I don’t offer this as too harsh a criticism – its perhaps inevitable that the band become more confident and able to express themselves over the course of 8 studio LPs, the EPs and the live records/performances. And I’m also perfectly willing to admit that I probably suffer an over-indulgence of nostalgia and wistfulness for those wistful 90s records.

And having said all that, there are still the mandatory B&S references to school, early love affairs, books and of course, reflexive considerations of the act of writing itself. The gentle strum of a song like “Read the Blessed Pages” wouldn’t have been out of place on IYFS, or, really, any other Belle and Sebastian record (“Love is like a novel, read the blessed pages”).

In terms of real standouts, tracks like “I Want the World to Stop” up the ante and the tempo to evoke the song’s sense of balancing precariously on an edge. Songs like this, along with “I’m Not Living in the Real World” and first single “Write About Love” combine the mature Belle & Sebastian sound with with their pervasive affecting quality which is by turns melancholy and uplifiting, and which is always thoughtful.

Something else that’s used well – as ever – by the band is the cacophony of instrumentation and vocal styles. Indeed, Sarah Martin has a number of standout performances, especially on “I Can See Your Future”. The guest voices (Norah Jones and actress Carey Mulligan) are also super: yes, I am giving deserved praise to Norah Jones (even if I long for a contribution by Monica Queen…).

There are a couple of problems: for some reason, the fanfare in “I can see your future” reminds me of the theme tune to BBC1 light entertainment prog “The One Show“, which kind of overshadowed the rest of the song for me. In fact the fanfare itself is a bit incongrous and even a bit of a caricature of what we might expect from a Belle & Sebastian record. It led me to worry that someone in the band has a serious Adrian Chiles fetish, and that’s kind of a shame.

And I guess if you were being churlish, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that in addition to the slick production there isn’t the level of adventure that we might have felt on earlier Belle & Sebastian records. I think that’s entirely fair as a point, but I don’t think it’s an overriding one in such a well-drawn collection of songs.

The record plays out with the rousing “Sunday’s Pretty Icons”, another high point. “Every lover that you forgot” goes the song: well, we won’t be forgetting Belle & Sebastian any time soon. In all, …Write About Love is a delight that may not soar as high as Tigermilk or If You’re Feeling Sinister: but that’s almost an impossible comparison. …Write About Love is a fine record, and one that will be re-played a great deal.

Listen for yourself! NPR’s First Listen is streaming …Write About Love until 12th October.

NPR: Belle & Sebastian …Write About Love