LIKE Prufrock in TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song Of Alfred J Prufrock – and it is not every day you start a review like that – I Am Kloot’s John Bramwell is now “measuring out his life in coffee spoons”.

Bramwell’s coffee is bitter, often in need of sugar or better still a tot of rum, but for all those complaining that he is as miserable as Manchester rain, this is not the time for jolly, frothy frivolity.

Like Morrissey, Hyde’s Bramwell is drawn to kitchen-sink dramas, the minutiae of the mundane, the tantalising glimpse of hope, the frustrating Englishness of it all.

Bramwell and his Kloot partners made their unexpected, long overdue and utterly deserved breakthrough with 2010’s Sky At Night, and expectations were consequently heightened for this follow-up, their sixth album. Again it is produced by Elbow’s Guy Garvey and Craig Potter, who know a thing or two about late-flowering success with their own north-western band.

Bramwell previewed a raft of these songs of regret and worry for what lies ahead in an intimate acoustic gig at Knaresborough’s Frazer Theatre last July, and now his earthly truths and heavenly melodies are given instrumental colour, strings here, brass there.

Reviews elsewhere have quibbled about the nocturnal glumness of it all, but these are men in their forties, telling it as it is. Load up the coffee spoons and savour the stark, dark beauty of Let It All In, Hold Back The Night and These Days Are Mine.

• I Am Kloot play Leeds Irish Centre on February 13. Watch this space for news of a rumoured gig in York too.