Hayden: Skyscraper National Park

The 1999 collapse of Outpost Records primarily wounded the Geffen offshoot's most promising act, Whiskeytown, which watched its potential breakout album, Pneumonia, sit in limbo for two years before being released by Lost Highway last year. But Outpost was also the home of Hayden, a Canadian lo-fi folk-rocker who had been prolific until the label dissolved, at which point he disappeared into the snowy wilderness. Last year, Hayden began touring again, toting along a limited-edition album, Skyscraper National Park. The hip, well-distributed Badman imprint snapped up the distribution rights, enabling Hayden to return to U.S. retailers in relative triumph. Skyscraper National Park offers 40 minutes of classic Hayden: mumbly, earnest, sometimes-dissonant ballads in the DIY roots-rock mode shared by fellow travelers Palace, Smog, and Varnaline. The singer-songwriter tinkers with both halves of his job description here, pushing his vocals in non-traditional directions, and offering songs that range from two-minute snippets to seven-minute sprawls. On the epic "Dynamite Walls," Hayden sets his vocal timbre to the same frequency as the snare drums and distorted electric guitars that back his pleasant acoustic picking; his voice purposefully fades into the backdrop. On "Steps Into Miles," Hayden switches to a high whine, which swoops around the sine-wave fluctuations of a steel guitar. "Long Way Down" ropes the lonely-wanderer aspects of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Tom Waits into one spare, pulsing plea for sympathy, while "Tea Pad" detours into jazzy instrumental post-rock, and the brief "All In One Move" recalls the jauntier side of Simon & Garfunkel, funneled through a Yo La Tengo drone. Hayden hews to the indie aesthetic of eclecticism, personality, and rawness that was still in vogue when he last recorded, though those values have been in decline since the dawn of the 2000s. Skyscraper National Park is a heartening throwback to the days when offbeat influences were absorbed and recontextualized through artists' sensibilities, not presented as an end in themselves (or worse, dropped altogether). Hayden draws from the traditions of eccentric folk-rock, but his ragged, harrowing concoction of acoustic gentility and electric anarchy stands as a genre all its own. Call it Ugly Americana.