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The debut album, Life Stream, has taken a couple of years to record but whatever obstacles and false starts the band had to endure in its making aren't at all apparent when listening to it. The opening track, Sparks, barely contains the euphoric potential of the band, as a rolling wave of horns, e-bowed guitar, glockenspiel and xylophone proves to be a fine 'Welcome' mat for the rest of the album.

Summer Solstice, a previous single release, has all of the unbridled, infectious joy of Belle and Sebastian at their least lachrymose. So far, so good - but no real surprises. However, if you've been at all aware of Tim and Sam's music prior to Life Stream, Coming Home is sure to have you checking the mp3 player hasn't skipped to a different band. There is singing - something of a volte-face for a band who'd only been known previously as an instrumental group.

The initial plan for the album was that it would feature a number of guest vocalists but that proved logistically impossible to pull together in time. So Tim and Rebecca decided to give it a go themselves. Remarkable, then, that they should just happen to have voices so suited to the music: pure, sonorous and impeccably performed.

The music eddies from major to minor keys and back again, encapsulating a panoramic range of emotions, sometimes in the space of a single piece of music. Reflections, for example, sounds like a contemplative Slint as it begins, dark of cloud and thought, then a glockenspiel and cello set the horizon ablaze with the kind of hope that gets us all through our most TS Eliot days.

It's breathtaking in a most unshowy way. Where Sigur Rós create music as massive, airy and impressive as the sky caging Iceland's Aurora and the dramatic volcanic landscape below, Tim and Sam are like a ramble in the Clwydian hills Tim has grown up being able to see out of his bedroom window (I imagine): rosy cheeked, invigorating, unspectacularly moving.

It's a youthful album and more evidence that being a young musician doesn't have to be about dull bravado and posturing. More often than its given credit for, it's about a lack of cynicism; a sense of possibilities; raw nerves that feel everything rather than ones that have callouses grown over them.

There is romance here, too - little 'r': no frilly shirts or narcissistic bouffant hair don'ts - and courageous vulnerability. And - in the lyrics of excellent next single Finders Keepers - defiance: "follow my lead, and don't even try to stop me".

Other than the reference points I've already mentioned, I hear echoes of The Beach Boys, Mogwai, Steve Reich, Incredible String Band, Tuung, The Cure (All Tucked Up sounds like an instrumental outtake from Disintegration) -- it's telling that none of the artists I hear in their sound are claimed as influences on their myspace page. This is indicative of a band who - despite the weight of musical history behind them - are following nothing other than their own muse.

That in itself makes them worthy of your investigation, the fact that Life Stream is as accomplished, thoughtful and lovingly-crafted as any album will hear this year makes it essential listening.