Cherry Ghost - Beneath This Burning Shoreline (Heavenly)

This second album by Manchester’s award-winning Cherry Ghost - Simon Aldred, Jim Rhodes, Ben Parsons, Grenville Harrop and Phill Anderson - is a fine follow-up to 2007’s acclaimed Thirst For Romance.

Doves and Massive Attack producer Dan Austin brings out the epic quality inherent in many of Simon Aldred’s songs here, allied to a rollocking country swagger and brooding guitar drives the early part of the album on tracks like the reverby 'We Sleep On Stones' and 'A Month Of Mornings', with its hints of early U2.

Aldred’s soulful croon is as distinctive a part of the sound as the twanging guitars, with its shades of a countrified Lloyd Cole, and you can see why they picked up an Ivor Novello song writing gong for the way they mesh a sense of laidback grandeur with crowd-singalong tunes on a track like 'Kissing Strangers' - a standout first single off the album, whose ‘stadium filler’ qualities crop up to a lesser extent on 'Black Fang' and 'Luddite'.

Other critics have picked out the funereal stateliness of 'The Night They Buried Sadie Clay' but other songs burn brighter amid the more reflective moments, such as the dark gem 'My God Betrays' and the achingly beautiful 'Diamond In The Grind'.

The mournful hooks and resonant imagery ('Where the fountains freeze/And teetering heels fall to their knees') of the gorgeous 'Barberini Square', meanwhile, bring to mind Elbow at their finest.

It feels right somehow that they close the album with an instrumental - 'Strays At The Ice Pond' - whose mix of fragile Satie-esque keyboards and lush strings provides a mournful balm to all the quiveringly restrained emotions gone before.