I Am Kloot – Sky At Night

I Am Kloot have been nearly men for longer than a lot of bands’ careers.

While not exactly newcomers even then, their 2001 debut album Natural History was a truculent, darkly poetic work that rose above all the cliches of the soon to ferment New Acoustic Movement, which loosely took its lead from the Mancunian trio’s stripped back arrangements but with little of Johnny Bramwell’s subverting lyrical bite. While they’ve continued on their own path that album’s producer Guy Garvey has concentrated more on his own band with somewhat more widely successful results.

You could read his return to the mixing desk for Sky At Night, alongside bandmate and nominal producer of The Seldom Seen Kid Craig Potter, as handing down edicts from their newly appointed palatial status now there is such a thing as “doing an Elbow”, but in their collective bluff Northern way it’s more likely they’re just trying to do their old mates a favour.

They’re certainly at home in using the studio properly, putting Bramwell’s nasally forceful, cracked voice front and centre, giving the instruments plenty of sharp seperation and fitting subtle orchestration into the gaps, ‘To The Brink’ breaking into a ballroom waltz of strings, ‘Radiation’ pitching dramatic horns and psychedelic touches into a slowly building sentiment that while sharing its ultimate optimism bypasses stadium unifying ‘One Day Like This’ grandiosity for its own means and its own central message: “everything we ever thought we’d ever want, me and you, it just came true”.

Generally Bramwell’s lyrics are still those of the sozzled philosopher, recurring references to the night sky, lights and stars beyond used as counterpoint to working out his lot in life and love, using the knowledge that the little things get you through. At times he seems too honest for his own good, confessing his “will to despise, make destruction my life” and hence ruining his dream love on ‘I Still Do’, accompanied only by delicate folky guitar and subtle harp.

If this is going to be some sort of public persona breakthrough, though, it feels like a missed opportunity. While in parts, like The Wave Pictures’ If You Leave It Alone in negative, it sounds like a louche acoustic band doing their own version of southern soul, it feels too one-paced and less immediate than their best work, a stately and thoughtful pace but lacking most opportunity for Bramwell to let loose at life’s ills. On the surface Bramwell’s winning dark humour has been wound back in favour of cultivating the bruises. Most glaringly, as fine a song as it is about cynicism and friendship, and despite the newly exuberant ending, putting a new version of ‘Proof’ from their 2003 self-titled second album on smacks of running short of ideas.

All the same, Sky At Night is a fine addition to the catalogue of a band who only do things their own way, even as Garvey and Potter fill in the sonic spaces expertly. On the last track Bramwell mournfully regards “the same clowns, the same shoes”. To a more positive extent he’s right – still looking deep into himself mapping out the human heart, coming up at the end with blissful poignancy and evoking charm from bad romance.