Just a half a verse into album opener, ‘Here In The Wild’, and you start to wonder why Ken Griffin ever allowed his honeyed tones to be hidden behind layers of feedback in his Rollerskate Skinny days. Griffin’s voice is that rarest of instruments, as warm and welcoming as an open fire in your favourite pub, albeit a pub where Scott Walker, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits just happen to be jamming in the corner.

Madness Is The Mercy is his second collection as August Wells, essentially a collaboration between the New York-based Dubliner and the piano virtuoso John Rauchenberger. Their sound is augmented by a host of musicians who contribute to these beautifully wounded “songs of love and loss, victory, peace and war”.

Sometimes the arrangements couch the dark soul-searching of the lyrics, from the nightmarish narrative of ‘Bread And Water’ to the easy listening of ‘Crazy Crazy Crazy’, which comes across like Fred Astaire singing Dante’s Inferno. ‘Daddy’ initially appears to be a catchy, arms-in-the-air singalong until you hear Griffin’s searing confession, where the singer admits to having “dragged a heavy chain across so many good people’s lives.” For Griffin’s sake, you hope that this is a case of putting himself in somebody else’s shoes and not an autobiographical cry for help.

The doom-laden ‘This Man Cries’ has all the confessional gravitas of Rick Rubin-era Johnny Cash, an outsider anthem of sadness, regret and hard living. “I don’t mind waking up on the kitchen floor/ Men like me, we kinda think that’s what a kitchen floor is for,” confesses Griffin at the song’s start, before narrating a litany of missed opportunities and admitting, “A life is a terrible thing to waste”.

‘Come On In Out Of That Night’ is pure Waitsean gospel, albeit without the tin can symphony; a soulful sibling of Uncle Tom’s Mule Variations, with a smattering of ‘70s-era Van. The magnificent ‘She Was A Question’ skirts and flirts with jazz, Griffin giving it his best Scott Walker croon, while a trumpet winds its way in and around the melody. This stately and brilliant – if sometimes too sombre – record ends with the vague optimism of ‘Have A Good Night Everyone’, a surprisingly big hearted croon that tries its damnedest to be hopeful.