The Modern Romantic

August is the biggest month of year for the music industry. Albums drop like pennies from heaven/flies. Because there's so many frikkin' albums out right now worth talking about, all week long, tMR ill be all music-all the time.

Darren Hayes
*This Delicate Thing We've Made
Powdered Sugar

First: a story. In High School, my friend Sarah and I were obsessed with Savage Garden, the Australian pop duo responsible for 'To the Moon and Back' and 'The Animal Song'. We would play Truly Madly Deeply in art class while imagining creating an elaborate mosaic mural for our school of Darren Hayes, the band's lead singer. I was visiting a friend in Los Cruces, NM when I bought Darren's first solo album Spin. I actually really liked it and imagined one day I would direct a music video for 'Carry on Dancing' with dead animals waltzing. Basically, the guy wanted to be the white Michael Jackson, but like most of the world, I haven't thought of him since.

Then, in 2006 he came out by marrying his boyfriend, Richard Cullen. and left his Columbia label. The result of all this independence is *This Delicate Thing We've Made, a 25 track independently produced double album. I saw Hayes at the Roxy a month ago and the first thing he said to the audience was that he had been "Justin Timberlake'd" and he's right--Timberlake's the white Michael Jackson. But while The Wardrobe Malfunctioner is Jackson circa Off the Wall, Darren Hayes is the Michael Jackson who made 'Black or White'; grandiose, self-serving, and a little creepy. It's worth checking out Jackson's video again and comparing it to Hayes' video of his first single, On the Verge of Something Wonderful. Also, if you poke around that link, you'll see that Darren Hayes wants you to fold origami birds and leave them for people to find thereby helping to bring beauty and surprise back into the world--but be sure to put the web address of Darren's site on the wing!

'But how's the album?', you ask. Well, it's the sort of thing you would expect from a two-disc Darren Hayes album. Only when the music deviates from cooing slow ballads is anything worth talking about-- and then the songs are only noteworthy for being mawkish parodies of 'edginess' or painful or delusional self confession. I was going to write more, but I'll just give you a sample lyric from How To Build a Time Machine: "Velocity equals distance traveled by time." It's followed by a falsetto squeal. Out Aug. 20.

Labels: music