British Sea Power's second album is leagues more refined than their wilfully awkward 2003 debut.

The Decline Of British Sea Power was the sound of motorbikes disrupting quiet country Sundays, but that ruefully wry record nevertheless caught the ear of Radiohead, Jeremy Vine, Bill Oddie , Ian Rankin, Damien Hirst and Julian Cope: testimony to an artful, intelligent Cumbrian band drawn to arcane history, melting icecaps, literature, birds and the power of nature over man's follies.

This time, in It Ended On An Oily Stage, they find God in a parking lot and a Wiltshire field "whilst you did not", an apt summation of the dual senses of wonder and frustration that course through their ultimately optimistic, Cope-like lyrics and graceful elegies. Yan sings throughout in whispers, most apposite for To Get To Sleep's tips on insomnia cures. Listening to the refreshingly original British Sea Power is not one of them.

Fellow North Westerners I Am Kloot, the Mancunian trio led by the rasp of Johnny Bramwell, join British Sea Power in nostalgic, cinematic reflection, but their scuffed third album is wracked with gothic disillusion and drenched in Manchester rain.

Bramwell, cussed and mischievous, locates a shadowland of monsters and vampiric beauty, bitter black regrets and fractured relationships and sets his downbeat vignettes to battered folk blues, maudlin jazz, clattering rhythms and ghostly organs. All's Bramwell that ends well, however, on the surprisingly jaunty coda, I Believe.

Updated: 09:17 Thursday, May 05, 2005