A harmonium creaks its billows open and a bass groove starts to propel the song forward on the opening title track of Hayden’s latest effort. With a hushed vocal that calls to mind Tim Hardin, Hayden has long been the hidden treasure of the Canadian music scene. Switching easily between piano led tales of melancholy and fuzzy guitar driven efforts there is a lot going on In Field and Town. Horn sections here, twinkling glockenspiel elsewhere, swooning synths on ‘Worthy of Your Esteem’. The list goes on.2008 has seen an awful lot of this sort of music been produced, and to truly stand out in a field in which Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes seem to have claimed as there own, Hayden needs to pull something truly special out of the bag. And, in the 1.41 of ‘Weight Of The World’, he has succeeded. Built on a simple acoustic guitar line, the vocals combine in perfect harmony with his female counterpart and produces a heartbreaking melody that simply has to go down as one of the songs of the year. If someone was trying to teach the basics of being a songwriter, they could do worse than start here. I’ve listened to it everyday since I got the album, and still haven’t tired of it’s simplistic beauty.While nothing else on the record can quite live up to ‘Weight of the World’, there is plenty here to show Hayden to be a master tunesmith, coming on like a resigned, less histrionic Canadian counterpart to Ed Harcourt. Hayden manages to break your heart with his resigned drawl on the likes of the mournful piano led ballad ‘The Hardest Part’, and lift the spirits with the more upbeat numbers on offer here such as US single ‘Where and When’, driven by hand claps and another fine bass groove until a trumpet duet arrives from nowhere to take the song to a triumphant end.Given Hayden’s previous records propensity to slowly creep into your consciousness, it would be no surprise if this became a record that matured with further and deeper listens. As it is it could well be the moment where Hayden finally steps into the spotlight his finely honed songwriting clearly deserves. 79%Hayden on MySpace