Love letters

I know I love Jo despite all the things I hate about her. I know I love her with as much certainty as I love Belle and Sebastian.

There are records that have been longer anticipated than Belle and Sebastian's The Boy With the Arab Strap, out this week. For sheer desperate breathlessness, though, you can't beat a Belle and Sebastian cultist. Lots of bands that have never made the charts have fan Web sites devoted to them, but few have fan sites as thorough and adoring as this one does, and still fewer provoke fiction written in the language of billets-doux. More than a few people have flown across the country, or across the ocean, to see the group play. There's a rather high-traffic e-mail list devoted to the band; one featured a lengthy discussion about whether the subject of the song "A Century of Elvis" is a dog, a cat, or what. A copy of their out-of-print, vinyl-only first album, 1996's Tigermilk, just raised u810, or a bit more than $1,200, at auction.

All this for a band from Glasgow, Scotland, that's played maybe 20 shows in two and a half years of existence (B&S took lots of time off while its members were working or going to school or whatever); whose early publicity photos were arty shots of people who weren't actually in the band; whose only American appearances to date have been two rapturously received performances--one at a former synagogue in New York City, the other a never-aired taping of the Chris Douridas-hosted Sessions on West 54th (the group decided its performance wasn't good enough); and whose first American label, the Enclave, coughed out a domestic edition of their second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, last year and then expired almost as soon as the band went home. In October, they'll be coming back for a few dates on the East Coast; they'll hit the West Coast early next year, and then that'll be it for a while. Tireless self-promoters, they aren't.

So why do so many people treat Belle and Sebastian less like a band than like their own personal boyfriend or girlfriend? Because they speak directly to smart, disaffected 19-year-olds and to the smart-disaffected-19-year-old part of everyone else. Because they do so in the voice of someone who's discovering the world and trying to figure out what to make of it. Because they're sexy like a shy, funny, literate partygoer who's worked up the nerve to come talk to you. Because their lyrics have one perfectly wrought turn of phrase after another. Because Stuart Murdoch's songs are so indefatigably catchy and so modest about it that they can be welcome houseguests forever. In sum, because this band deserves it.

As Belle and Sebastian's chief songwriter, singer, and guitarist, Murdoch would be, you'd figure, the center of this cult of personality, its Morrissey figure. Instead, he tries very hard to be simply part of an ensemble: Four songs on the new album are written by his bandmates, and he hates doing interviews. "It's working without him doing it," lead guitarist Stevie Jackson explains by telephone from the Glasgow flat he shares with the group's violinist Sarah Martin, "so if it works, why fix it? Some people in the pop world are really good at having a public persona, people with agendas who like to talk about things. But not everybody can do that." If you want to talk to the band, you get to talk to someone else. The songs are all we get of Murdoch.

The Boy With the Arab Strap is the subtlest of Belle and Sebastian's three albums, and it takes the longest to stake its claim in the head. Recorded over the course of nearly a year and monkeyed with extensively, it peers around corners where Sinister and the Lazy Line Painter Jane EP came out and declared their passionate engagement with the moment. Murdoch sings like he's trying not to wake someone up, and the band mostly seems to be holding back--the loudest sound on the album is a string crescendo. The lyric focus has changed too: Most of the Arab Strap songs concern the world as it might be, rather than as it is--dreams deferred or unwanted rather than not yet realized.