Belle and Sebastian met in an all-night café in Glasgow, and their debut album, Tigermilk was written and recorded over the next few weeks. It's remarkable, therefore, that Tigermilk is Belle and Sebastian's finest by some length; a gorgeous album poised somewhere in between the shambling Scottish charm of The Pastels and the delicate pathos of Nick Drake. The heart of Tigermilk is in frontman Stuart Murdoch's choral whisper; impossibly fragile elegies are spurred to greatness by the band's energetic Northern Soul rhythms and sprightly folk. Tigermilk, though, is replete with a muscular tension on tracks like "Expectations" and "I Don't Love Anyone" that downplays Belle and Sebastian's sometimes annoying tendency to drift into syrupy twee-ness. --Louis Pattison