Album Review: Hayden - Moving Careful + Rarities (20th Anniversary Reissue)
Lovers reuniting after time apart. A domestic disturbance
heard through the paper-thin walls of an apartment complex. A new haircut. A
couple splitting a pack of cigarettes.
These things—some banal, others not as much—are the things
that Hayden Desser writes songs about. Or, at least, wrote songs about in the
very early days of his lengthy career.
But first, an aside:
Hayden’s sophomore full length, The Closer I Get, and his only flirtation with a moderately major
label (in the United States), is celebrating its 20th anniversary in
two months—don’t worry, I’ll be tackling that sprawling and verbose
commemorative thinkpiece very soon.
As of right now, it does not seem like Hayden has any grand
plans for a reissue. The compact disc is practically out of print—though
currently still available through his web store. Four years ago, for Record
Store Day (in Canada), The Closer I Get
was reissued in a very limited vinyl run—copies of it fetch over $100 on
Discogs right now.
Two years ago, Hayden celebrated the 20th anniversary of his idiosyncratic debut, EverythingI Long For—reissuing it on vinyl, with a few extras tacked on at the end.
In continuing with his look back at his earliest material, he recently reissued
the EP Moving Careful, originally released
in 1996—strangely being referred to as the 20th anniversary edition,
it also includes an additional seven tracks pulled from various singles he
released during this time period.
On the day Moving
Careful went on sale to the general public, Hayden also put three copies
(yes, only three copies) of three other, out of print albums in his web store—Skyscraper National Park, Everything I Long For, and The Closer I Get.
Three copies of each, on sale at 9 a.m. CST.
You know, for a second there, I thought I had it—I quickly
added The Closer I Get, as well as Moving Careful to my cart. I was taken
to the PayPal screen and was desperately trying to complete my transaction, but
then, something went wrong. I was taken back to the web store shopping cart,
and only Moving Careful was in it.
The Closer I Get
was gone—sold out. Sold out from under me.
* * *
Moving Careful,
while more of a compilation rather than a cohesive full-length, still mostly works
as a whole because it is a snapshot of a specific time. It finds Hayden beginning
moving away from the more quirky and abrasive elements that he explored on Everything I Long For, but he has yet to
fill out the sound with more instrumentation, as he would do on The Closer I Get. The songs collected
here are sparse, with just the right amount of being ‘off kilter,’ and often
times they seem like they maybe on the verge of coming undone, like the early
recording of “Stride,” though the songs never do wind up falling apart.
In his very early 20s when this material was written and
recorded, some of the moments on Moving
Careful are rather saccharine, like “Middle of July,” however, there are
songs where it’s clear that Hayden was already on his way to hitting his stride
as a songwriter, like the hushed and fragile opening track, “Pots and Pans,”
and the dark and desperate pleading of Moving
Careful’s final track, “You Are All I Have," which is, hands down, this collection's finest moment.
The additional seven tracks of this Moving Careful reissue are dubbed ‘Plus Rarities,’ and they all, for the most part, are cut from the
same cloth as their counterparts. Some of them are incredibly short—giving off
the feeling that they are more sketches or rough ideas, as opposed to a
completed, or fully developed song.
Tracks like “Hazy” and “Winter Trip” also lean more toward
the slightly abrasive, caustic aesthetic Hayden still worked within on some of Everything I Long For—while “A Fortune
I’d Kept” and “Carry on Mentality” are exponentially more melodic and easier on
the ears, and the collection’s closing track, “Wasting My Days Away,” finds the
balance between the snarling dissonance and the whispered and acoustic folk.
Despite his spot on the soundtrack to Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, and his brief stint on a
Universal Records subsidiary, Hayden, to my knowledge, has not found much outside
of a cult audience in the United States; though I get the impression that in
his native Canada, he’s a much bigger deal. The cult-like status fits his music
well, however—specifically a moderately fragile collection like Moving Careful. It’s not a very
energetic listen, though it certainly doesn’t need to be, and Hayden has never
been one to make consistently energetic music. Calling it ‘simple’ seems like
you’re selling it short, but songs like this—sparse, void of trappings, et. al—allow
the evocative nature of Hayen’s lyrics, whether they are about the mundane or
not, to show through clearly.
Moving Careful + Rarities is out now as a limited edition LP, via the man's own Hardwood Recordings.
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