Review

The sublime sound of sadness.
Generations of songwriters have coped with misery, some have even drawn inspiration from it, but few wallow in it quite as enthusiastically as Hayden. He inhabits it body and soul, treating it as a place from which there’s no escape — and since he’s stuck there, he might as well relax and enjoy himself a little. The characters on his fifth studio album lack both hope and options: in “The Hardest Part,” a woman in an unhappy relationship has no respite except fantasy, while the naïve lovers in “The Van Song” shuttle around on public transportation, their scant comfort in each other leeched away by the glazed abjection of the passengers around them. In “Damn This Feeling,” anger and hurt connect a jilted boyfriend to the girl that got away: “I think I’m healing/ Damn this feeling,” he sings.

Musically, Hayden’s progressed: he switches from acoustic guitar to piano, leaning closer to pop than ever before. “Did I Wake Up Beside You?” feels like home-schooled Burt Bacharach, and “More Than Alive” channels ’70s singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. But Hayden would be well-served by grafting a little of the former’s bouncy melodicism, or the latter’s droll humor. His scratchy mumble undersells his best lines, and his refusal to deliver his characters from their predicaments or offer them chances at redemption becomes claustrophobic. Only the title track really breathes, perking up to a rhythm almost worthy of a dance floor and pushing misery, however briefly, to the sidelines.