Belle & Sebastian

People are under the false impression that Belle & Sebastian craft nothing but Scottish mope music. Oh, sure, "Sleep the Clock Around" is Darvocet disco, and "The Model" is as tender as prime rib. But "Step Into My Office, Baby"? That's a hip-thrusting, horn-blowing jam. And "I'm a Cuckoo" is just plain playful.

Of course, when they do manic-depressive rock, Belle & Sebastian do it better than anyone. "The State I'm In" pushes a steady backbeat behind deeply personal bedroom poetry, "I'm Waking Up to Us" blooms like a spring flowerbed and bleeds like an open wound, and "Roy Walker" snaps like nimble fingers.

The lesser-known work of Belle & Sebastian is actually some of the group's best. "Seymour Stein" speaks of loneliness and leaving on a jet plane well enough to cause rampant weeping, "It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career" is a stark death ballad, and "Piazza, New York Catcher" is a bizarre love letter to a certain baseball player.

As anyone who's seen one of their shows can attest, Belle & Sebastian are about as sweeping, theatrical, and uncomfortably direct as indie rock gets. Led by the ultra-literate, complex character Stuart Murdoch, the band approaches albums the way a writer nears the Great American Novel — turning expanding and contracting sound into tone poems of kaleidoscopic colors, alluding to classic balladry, chamber pop, and oldies so golden Archimedes could use them to prove his theories of weight and volume.