Search - Hayden :: Moving Careful

As good as an e.p. gets...

Mike Smith | Albuquerque, NM | 09/03/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This e.p. is amazing--full of the kind of Hayden songs I love best, full of the kind of songs that anyone who loved "Everything I Long For" would freak out about: songs in which the mundane is clarified into poignancy, the ordinary distilled to its tragic essence, and the everyday exposed as the ineffable and the amazing.

I love Hayden's "Everything I Long For" album, but I have to say most of his other work never caught on for me. This e.p., however, did.

"Pots and Pans" is a beatiful ode to an evening of making happy noise, from the less-happy perspective of the noismaker's neighboring apartment-dweller, "Half for Me" is a sad paen to a love lost over the motif of shared cigarettes, and "You Are All I Have" is so crushingly desperate that I can only imagine that whoever it was written for must have been simaltaneously touched and repelled.

All these songs are great, the secret track is interesting, and the CD represents what I think was a (I said A, not THE) high point for modern indie music in general and for Hayden in particular.

Buy it, for sure."