Hayden - Skyscraper National Park
(Hardwood)
Hayden: one trick pony or an overlooked Canadian folk hero? I’m going to go with the latter on this one, and I’ve got the facts to back it up. Look at his debut album, Everything I Long For, a combination of fucked-up story songs ("Skates," "Driveway") and morose ballads ("My Parents House," "Hardly")--all mixed in with hardcore-inspired crunchy numbers and screaming. What? Does that sound bizarre, or what? Well, it was, in a lot of ways, but it was also a masterpiece and one of my favourite albums ever. Period. Then came the EP, Moving Careful, which was a combination of earlier stuff and later stuff, and which lends itself well to rainy nights spent inside alone (and yes, that’s an awfully pretentious statement, but I’m going with it because it’s true). It’s pretty hard to find, now, but pick it up if you get the chance. After that came The Closer I Get, often maligned, but still overall a very strong album.
And then he disappeared! I saw him in 1998 (my first show), and he seemed to be enjoying himself, but then he went away. So, it’s been three years and in that time he’s put together Skyscraper National Park. And it’s really good, marrying a lot of the sounds he was achieving on Everything (minus the screaming) with the orchestrated vibe of Closer. Catching him at a show performing these songs, you wouldn’t think he’d stopped touring and dropped out of sight at all.
It starts off with the lugubrious "Streetcar," which is a fairly standard Hayden song: fairly guitar based, with minimal electronics and drum sounds in the background. The next song is a real kicker, though, "Dynamite Walls," a 6+ minute electrified build. It’s perhaps the best track on the album, with lyrics like "open your eyes, put it in drive/get on the road and just go," and very simple drumming. When I saw the H-man in concert recently, he explained that the song was "about touring." It’s some of the best stuff Canada has to offer.
Another highlight is the absolutely bizarre "Bass Song," which is about people breaking into Hayden’s house and killing him while he records a song... yeah. I’m being serious. Check out the lyrics: "and I couldn’t hear them/with my headphones on recording a song/they broke my windows/and walked inside beneath me as I played on/unaware of what was going on." It’s played on piano, with very up-front drum accompaniment and washed out strings. Really quite creepy, but fantastic. The album closer is also magnificent in its simplicity and beauty. It is driven primarily by acoustic guitar and drums playing a waltz beat. And with lyrics like, "The long, long day is through/the light’s been replaced by blue/you lie awake in your room/thinking about what to do," and some horn backing, the song is a perfect, bittersweet ending to a really nice album.
While Skyscraper National Park is not a perfect album, there are no truly bad songs, which, in itself, is a feat, and there’s a mood prevalent throughout the whole thing. Honestly, this is going to be one of my year’s ten best, and it’s good to see such a strong return from someone I’d thought gone for good.
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