By the time Oasis cloned it, fattened it up, shoved marching powder up its nose and gave it the full Adidas makeover, the only thing indie music shared with its beleaguered twin was a name. In the mid-90s, with The Smiths and the bands that came in their wake long defunct, a strain of pop music for people who read books and wore duffle coats had suddenly become an endangered species.

Hence, when Belle And Sebastian arrived in 1996, they represented a rearguard action for a marginalized aesthetic. People who complained that their live shows sounded like an unrehearsed school orchestra were missing the point. As weapons go, such unabashed feyness was probably no more effective than those poor Tibetan monks who think that meditation is a more powerful weapon than Chinese guns. But there’s a difference between pledging your allegiance and simply picking the winning team. 13 years after The Smiths released This Charming Man, Belle And Sebastian re-emphasised the core values of indiepop. Now, another 13 years on, here’s an album that will do it all over again.

If React or Die feels like the result of all that history, that’s no accident. Like Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, Butcher Boy’s 34-year-old frontman John Blain Hunt gravitated from Ayrshire to Glasgow and spent years observing the city’s music scene as an outsider. He was a published poet before meeting musicians who helped him to turn his creations into the songs on Profit in Your Poetry, his debut album in 2004. But as if to formalise his transition to proper frontman, his group’s second album begins with When I’m Asleep – little more than a single couplet repeated over a fine rain of cello and mandolins.

Beyond the opening-credits sweep of that song, Hunt’s words fill the void where the important stuff between friends and lovers inevitably remains unsaid. You’re Only Crying for Yourself is a case in point, a meeting between two changed souls attempting in the face of circumstances to understand each other. With the halting metre of a Caledonian Jake Thackray. Hunt sings, “The face in the photograph would send me home but you won’t”.

If there’s tenderness in the tension he describes, it works the other way too. “We jaw for a month but we’re such kittenish drunks that it makes it worse,” he sings on This Kiss Will Marry Us, before Aioife Magee’s violin swirls like a thermal current beneath him.

Here and elsewhere, the pretty precision of Butcher Boy’s arrangements suggests several turntable miles spent alternately listening to the 1960s French pop dandy Michel Polnareff and, on Clockwork, the Charlie Brown pianist Vince Guaraldi. That Hunt should have grown up on a diet of Peanuts strips seems appropriate given the sentiments of songs such as A Better Ghost, where much as the hapless round-headed kid might once have done, he utters, “You’re haunted by a better ghost than me”.

And despite Sunday Bells being the only tune here that runs fast enough to break into a sweat, every song in React or Die elicits a thrill beyond speed or volume. The secret ingredient here is the monastic commitment that the most beautiful pop songs divine from those given the job of playing them. By filling up an album with them, Butcher Boy have set a standard against which every other release this year must surely be judged.

(How Does It Feel to be Loved?, TS £9.78)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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