The sonic shockwaves emanating from the Merseyside area have ensured W&H have recently been concentrating on Liverpool, but as ever we mustn't take a weather eye off that other great city a short hop down the East Lancs road either.
"I Am Kloot", the eponymously-titled second album from this literate, but twisted Mancunian trio, is very much the proof of the pudding where this theory is concerned. Two years plus since their criminally under-valued debut "Natural History" and it looks as though their days of grubbing around the margins is coming to an end, as this as fine a dark'n'challenging pop album you'll hear all year.
The album's two trailer singles (the stoned, but endearing shamble of "Untitled #1" and the primordial, Stooges-style attack of "Life In A Day") hinted at potential, if rather quixotic, greatness ahead, but while "I Am Kloot" retains the essential idiosyncracies of leader Johnny Bramwell's muse, it's an altogether more consistent singer-songwriterly affair, with more twists and chicanes than an afternoon at Hockenheim.
Indeed, while they probably make more sense in this context, the singles are by no means the finest things here. Instead, I'd point you straight to elegant, elegiac pop moments like the superb "From Your Favourite Sky" and the closing "The Same Deep Water As Me", where the faded glamour is suddenly interrupted by some lovely horns straight outta "After The Goldrush."
Actually, that's one of the key things about "I Am Kloot": it sounds live, close-miked and entirely natural. Subtle keyboard textures seep in gradually and on occasion a song (like the glorious downbeat resignation of "Here For The World") is framed by dignifed, rolling piano, but mostly you're right there in the room with Bramwell, bassist Peter Jobson and drummer Andy Hargreaves as they create these strange, but madly attractive vignettes and they've sensibly rejected anything not totally crucial to the plot.
In a few places, "IAK" sonically reminds this writer of a less murderous version of Elvis Costello's "Blood And Chocolate," another great album tracked virtually live in the studio. The clean, but stinging guitar motif that launches "Sold As Seen" comes from a similar textbook, while the percussive, descriptive "3 Feet Tall" ("3 feet tall, with a head like a bowling ball, can't get up from where you fall") is a credible, but slightly more playful sister act.
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Lyrically, too, Johnny Bramwell deserves to be bracketed in a similar category as the young Mr.McManus. His tracts are fully of visceral, and wryly observed images that weave addictive spells around Kloot's best songs. Just check out lines like "And you dress like a dame and burn on a Catholic flame by the hour" ("From Your Favourite Sky") or "Looks like a saint, drinks like a scholar, there's things in this town you can buy for one dollar" ("Cuckoo") for all the proof you need. The fact he delivers them with that essentially accented Manc burr only heightens the individuality.
Bizarrely, too, this writer's two very favourite tracks come right in the middle, customarily the place where albums run out of steam. Not "IAK," though. It has the magnificently dreamy "Mermaids": an absolute gem replete with sonar bleeps, lone bell chimes, dragging anchor chains and majestic guitar melodies. It's the loveliest sub-aqua classic since The Chills' brilliant "Submarine Bells" - and you've no excuse for not searching that record out, either.
Amazingly, though, "Proof" betters it. An exercise in gentle resignation, with simple rhymed couplets, sympathetic organ and positively heroic tambourines, it's one of those great "la la la" pop songs that by rights shouldn't hope to work. By God it does, though: when Bramwell reaches that simple kiss off line of "Who am I without you?" you'll just melt. I do every single time.
"I Am Kloot" is a truly fabulous album from a trio who've remained in the shadows long enough. Only the terminally blinkered could deny they're the dark horses making real headway through the pack at this stage.
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