Trust Fund: Has It Been A While? (Tapete Records)

Anyone who misses those classic early Belle and Sebastian albums - before Stuart Murdoch loosened his hold on the songwriting reins - should prepare to get very excited. Trust Fund supremo Ellis Jones spent years making well-reviewed indie guitar pop before taking a rewarding detour into soulful, baroque indie-folk - and it's an inspired move.

Sonically, Has It Been A While? doesn't do anything radical, but it doesn't need to. The songs' pretty, spacious classical guitar / strings arrangements are reminiscent of Kings of Convenience (remember them?) and even, high praise indeed: Robert Kirby's work with Nick Drake. It's a classic, timeless sound that would be just as home on a 60s Vashti Bunyan record - the perfect soundbed for Jones' poetic, diaristic lyrics.

These twelve songs, on Jones' first album since 2018, explore the angsts and pleasures of growing up different.Opener Leaving the Party Early is a good advert for the abum as a while. Having a great big brain often just means more opportunities for neurotic overthinking, it seems: We hear of trips to the doctor and the struggles of "Keeping sober, trying to stay alive". Meanwhile, Nietzsche and Spinoza get a big-up ("Thirty-seven centuries of old morose philosophers... / and still it's only two who were even close...")

Many songs muse over those formative school and childhood experiences, searching for the key to explain why the narrator often finds life so hard. The laidback samba feel of A Wooden Medal ("...for being good and faithful...") has definite echoes of golden-era Morrissey. Its couplet "I don't know why we even try / 'Seasonal Affective Disorder in July" seems a close cousin of Ask's "Spending warn summer says indoors". But that's not to say they aren't shafts of sunlight through the clouds. Curtis pays tribute to a boy who makes the narrator's heart sing, while In the Air hymns a weekend away with a lover, though the occasionally ambigous lyrics also forshadow the end ("I guess everyone goes away").

Some of the songs - such as The Mirror (introvert meets extrovert) are duets with Celia MacDougall of Radiant Heart. Her light, poignant voice is an effective foil to Jones' softly spoken/sung, well-enunciated tones, adding another colour to the album's overall sound. The Hinterland, meanwhile, is a moving profile of someone who "Grew up in the hinterland of artisans and farmers / Who you admired but did not want to be..." Luckily, as it often does, art saves the day ("On radio, on television / Came a sound and came a vision / That fed dreams of beyond the dry stone wall'.

This feels like a very complete album, the perfect accompiment to an introspective autumn afternoon. Dive in and wallow. 4/5