We always feel that a musician must be doing something right if they violently split opinion – by which we mean the opinions of dedicated listeners, not the predictable, shallow spats between reviewers and some teenage band’s friends and family. We have seen King Of Cats provoke more anger and distress in audiences than is anywhere near common, and we have witnessed seasoned promoters, engineers and gig-goers in rapt attention, throwing around terms like “genius” with gay abandon. We dare say it’s nice to be universally lauded as an artistic messiah, but when disinterested parties are prepared to spend time arguing about your worth, you know you’ve made a good start.

Brighton (via Oxford) denizen King Of Cats has raised these post-gig debates by creating an onstage avant-troubadour persona that’s half wryly confessional anti-folk Woody Allen, and half punk noise ointment fly, a japing Loki creating harsh electronic bleeps and screeching atonally in the middle of quiet ballads. And perhaps this download, billed as the debut LP, demonstrates a maturing of the Cats sound: the record might be wilfully lo-fi and amateurishly oblique, but it’s built around real songs, songs that the King seems to be intent on respectfully delivering, rather than puckishly destroying. Perhaps, to be brutal, a man who can’t sing in any conventionally recognised manner has found a way to use his voice to serve his fascinating little songs. So, only ‘Recorded at the gathering of the tribes galley, New York City’ (like Brooklyn Beckham, all tracks are simply named after the US location in which they were created, and all apparent typos and random capitalisations are the artist’s own) is an ugly King Of Caterwauls screech, whereas ‘Recorded at Maggie’s house, San Fransisco’ is a grunge Dylan buzz, and ‘Recorded on a cherry picker in seattle’ uses a querulous spider-strand of a vocal line to sketch out a lyric of melancholic resignation. It’s as if King Of Cats has given up trying to use his flawed voice to sing, and has worked out how to use it to act. If it’s good enough for Lou Reed…

Most tracks start and end with the nostalgic click of a tape recorder, and musically the LP follows suit, being primarily a collection of sparse, rickety acoustic skeletons on the verge of collapsing into dust, but this awkward delicacy serves the fragmented intimacy of the lyrics perfectly. There are some subtly lovely touches too, ‘Recorded on a plane, in the high desert and seattle’ pitching an almost melodic croon against some thin, stately keys, like The Folk Implosion channelling Federico Mompou, and our favourite, ‘Recorded in the damp in New Orleans’ coming off like some spectral, netherworld Paul Simon duetting with a chirruping digital canary. The unexpected tinny electronic drums on the closing track also offer a pleasing palette change.

Lyrically, like most Cats tracks, America’s songs are emotional, diaristic outbursts refracted and atomised until they read like emo haikus, but at their best they can be surprising, funny and moving. ‘Recorded Next to the traintracks inFlagstaff Arizona’ is our pick, opening with the typically opaque, “I bet you six pounds you’ll get what you want to, by the end of October”. There’s a defeated bohemian air to lines like this, like a beat poet who has thrown out the asocial boasting and outsider celebrations (we always felt that Ginsberg at least partly saw Howl part one as a checklist), and replaced them with distanced self-disgust. “Let’s prove we’re men by lighting fires and pissing them out again”, as a repeated refrain sardonically advises.

We’re not going to claim this album is great – at times it’s not even any good – but it does feel like a worthwhile work of art, at once heartfelt and deliberately confounding. A local reviewer can spend a lot of time listening to music designed to rock a chum’s VI form ball, or calculated to attract a Radio 2 playlister, and that’s fine, but it’s always wonderful to hear idiosyncratic music made solely for the tiny fraction of the world who will understand it, even if we don’t always feel ourselves to be part of that miniscule fraternity. One glorious moment in ‘Recorded in golden gate park, San Fransisco,at the end of a show’ sums up King Of Cats’ relaxed artistry, as we hear his keening voice in the background, and some audience members jockishly high-fiving next to the recording mike: If you find something to love in King Of Cats, you’ll be welcomed with open arms, but if you don’t, there’s no pressure. You might even find yourself on his next LP.

America is available at the King Of Cats BandCamp page