If you saw??'Hi Fidelity', you'll remember the scene where John Cusack walks into the record an winces: "Who's this?" "It's Belle and Sebastian". Those were the days when Belle and Sebastian was a byword for everything shy, fey and wool-wearing about indie music. But my, how things changed with the release of 2004's Trevor Horn-produced 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress'.

While singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch had spoken in the past of his love of the perfect pop song, here it was in evidence at last; bright, Technicolor tones of 60's psych, 70's new wave, electro-pop. Die-hard B&S fans balked - it was a million miles away from the gentle, shambling sounds of yore - and B&S?haters were equally confused.

And yet if you listen closely to this new, seventh album, you'll hear that the change in sound is not so much a turn-around as a transformation, like that of caterpillar to butterfly; the essence remains the same. Murdoch's story-telling, for instance, still finds his heroines in such glam environs as the laundrette, or wandering tound the herbaceous borders of the park. There are still kids in dodgy tracksuits, girls having crushes on each other, wandering round graveyards etc. But the arrangements are radically different, and at times the effect is a bit like going shopping with your mum and watching her come out of the changing rooms in a sequin top: half brilliant, half slightly weird, as on 'Song For Sunshine', which features lazily funky guitar work that Shuggie Otis would be proud of, with perfumed Philly harmonies.

Where it works (the Roxy-ish 'The Blues Are Still Blue') it's fantastic, but Murdoch's love of all things 60's beat pop verges on turning some of the more upbeat tracks into an all-dancin quirkfest. And yet despite the fact that 'The Life Pursuit' is a couple of tracks too long, songs like the slow, sweet 'Mornington Crescent' find Murdoch at his best - and Belle and Sebastian, at their best, sound like nobody else.