Upon entering his fiftieth year upon this earth, Edwyn Collins is sounding angrier than ever. His voice cracks and strains as he bemoans the state of his life and the limits that have been imposed on him, AND IT’S GETTING HIM DOWN. Losing Sleep is an album where the former Orange Juice frontman has more to prove than ever; following the debilitating brain hemorrhages which he suffered five years ago, his road to recovery (as detailed in his wife Grace Maxwell’s brilliant book Falling and Laughing) has been incredible, with his return to the stage two years later nothing short of miraculous. Consequently, even before pressing play, the record is something of an achievement, but that doesn’t make Collins complacent in the slightest.

Much was read into the allegedly foreboding lyrics of Edwyn’s 2007 masterpiece Home Again; references to unrest and pain abounded, and even more throwaway lines – “I fell down and banged my head, then I cried” – given the Nostradamus treatment. On Losing Sleep, this kind of speculation is somewhat more invited; Collins’ lyrical scope has narrowed, with his rants against the music industry and endearingly clever-clever dissections of romantic entanglement understandably absent. Rather, he falls in line with the old cliché “write about what you know,” hence the majority of the album is spent on a subject with which he has been getting increasingly used to over the last half-decade: himself. The record itself is certainly his boldest in a decade, and while Edwyn may not always be in full voice – a slurred word here, a fluffed note there – the raw, one-take production does wonders for this newly-acquired attitude. The title track (and lead single) contains some extremely candid self-analysis – “I’m insecure about my life, about my work” – but the brash Northern Soul backing seems to suggest that these worries are fleeting. Similarly, closing track ‘Searching for the Truth’ – originally snuck out as a b-side in 2008 – was the first song Collins wrote after his illness, and has developed into a lushly rambling country ballad; from any other songwriter, the statement “I will always be lucky in my life” would sound arrogant; from Collins, however, it simply sounds like…well…the truth.

Losing Sleep also plays home to some intriguing collaborations, though their variable success rate is curious; the biggest disappointment is ‘Do It Again’, partly penned by Nick McCarthy and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand – one of the first bands who championed the Orange Juice revival. While Collins’ verses (and you can definitely still tell his work from the people he’s working with) are slinky and subtle, with some nifty Hammond organ snaking through the mix, the Franz boys simply sound unprepared, and too eager to ape their mentor to really work. Likewise, the two hard-hitting Ryan Jarman co-writes are passable, as was much of the last Cribs album, but ‘What Is My Role?’ leaves Collins sounding like nothing more than a guest on his own album, his role seemingly being to chime in on the chorus.

The album’s biggest success, however, comes from its most unexpected partnership – with New York’s hippest groups, The Drums. ‘In Your Eyes’, which kicks off side two, is not only the best thing on Losing Sleep, but possibly Collins’ best song in fifteen years. It’s a sparkling paean to the simpler things in life – “leaving the city” and “finding a new place” being the orders of the day – with Edwyn’s almost motorik verse, giving way to a soaring chorus from Drums singer Jonathan Pierce. Sure, Pierce’s vocals are no less affected than his usual efforts, but the gorgeously spacious musical backing and Edwyn’s sonorous warble give it a far more sympathetic counterpoint, and once the glorious keyboard-led mid-section kicks in, with some perfectly-timed handclaps to boot, it’s hard not to think that this track was where the miraculous recovery of Edwyn Collins was heading for all along.

It’s on ‘Over the Hill’ that Collins makes his biggest statement; refusing to live up to the song’s title just yet, he instead sets up “a grand conceit: clarity, simplicity.” It’s one of the album’s most touching lyrics, and as a manifesto for the future of his career, it’s perfect. It’s this simplicity that most of his collaborators on the album seem to overlook, thus preventing Losing Sleep from achieving true greatness. Still, as an LP that came as a result of some seriously slim medical odds, it’s remains a stridently impressive piece of work.