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Every autumn, when the air gets crisp and a fresh cohort of college kids descends upon the city, Belle & Sebastian start sneaking their way up my iTunes most played list. So it seemed like a great cosmic coincidence when an advance copy of Belle & Sebastian's BBC Sessions (Matador) hit my inbox just in time for the start of the new season.

Due out November 18, BBC Sessions is a collection of songs recorded by Belle & Sebastian during trips to the Beeb between 1996 and 2001. It's great, and it reminds me that what I love about frontman Stuart Murdoch and his band of demure Scots is how they perfectly capture a particular and precious collegiate lifestyle that, frankly, I still miss every year around this time.

Belle & Sebastian's best work-songs like the delicately spiteful "Stars Of Track And Field" and the wistful tabloid fantasy "Piazza, New York Catcher"--are simple but lush, fey but fork-tongued. That combination of intellectual insolence and emotional insecurity is, I suspect, very familiar to all you fellow liberal-arts majors out there. The band's not shy about inviting academic associations either: The girl on the cover of their 1996 breakthrough album, If You're Feeling Sinister, is reclining beside a tattered copy of Kafka's The Trial.

BBC Sessions, which contains gems like the knowingly sad-sack "The State I Am In" and "Seymour Stein," easily the prettiest song ever about a music business maker, serves up as much of Murdoch and Co.'s folk-pop charms as we've come to expect, but it showcases, in a way that no other Belle & Sebastian album has, the graceful muscularity of the band's live show. Check, for example, the frantic keyboard breakdown on "Lazy Jane" or the slyly funky rhythms of the previously unreleased shaggy dog tale "Shoot The Sexual Athlete." Sure, Belle & Sebastian never leaves its inherent egg-headedness behind, but BBC proves that the band is far from wimpy. And it all sounds great when the streets swarm with students and fallen leaves.

What's your soundtrack for fall? Do you also go for softer sounds during pumpkin picking season? Share your favorite back-to-school bands in the comments section.