Patrick Watson, Close to Paradise

Sensitive Californian Watson hitches ride to vogue-ish Montreal scene, wows local luminaries with jaw-dropping performances and — presto — there's another celestial star in the galaxy of alterna-rock. Is this the rock & roll dream made flesh or more proof that, a decade on from his tragic dip in the Mississippi, the loss of Jeff Buckley is still felt as keenly as ever?

Patrick Watson may be a piano man at heart (confusingly, he fronts a four-piece band that shares his name) but his songs positively shiver with longing and lust. Don't let the tinkling Bavarian waltz "Weight of the World" fool you into thinking he's only here to work shifts at the Cabaret Café when Rufus Wainwright goes missing; once the woozy, Sgt. Pepper-era harmonies of “Man under the Sea” haul you in, there's no alternative other than to be sucked into the vortex of Watson's musical whirlpool. Deep breath then.

Unlike so many singer-songwriters who present themselves as plaid-clad Atlases, struggling with the weight of the world, with Watson that crushing feeling never arrives. Instead, by the time he croons “For a minute of the day/ You taste so sweet” during the shimmering baroque pop of “Luscious Life,” you realise Close to Paradise is the sort of album people will cherish in student dorms and hash-filled bedrooms long after this year's other fast-fads have run their course. Admittedly, this artful mix of steel-pedal guitar, glitch-cognizant drums and vocal crescendos marks him out as flavour of the month, but Watson seems headed somewhere far more other-worldly.

Fame and fortune may already loom on the horizon, but Watson — as he admits in "The Great Escape" — is more interested in charting a path toward unknown pleasures somewhere “far from all the things that we are.”