Maybe it's because we weren't paying enough attention, but we used to think of Paul Hayden Desser as just another harmless singer-songwriter.

With his fifth full-length Elk-Lake Serenade, however, he's kinda starting to freak us out a little. Not musically; the mumbly Toronto troubadour still favours rustic settings, beautifully bittersweet piano ballads and strummy, slackerish folk-rock reminiscent of Neil Young or Nick Drake.

Lyrically, though, this deceptively titled disc is less a Serenade than a collection of campfire songs from hell.

In Killbear, an ex-lover is mauled to death by a grizzly while in the woods with her cowardly new boyfriend; Hollywood Ending is a bizarre nightmare of fandom and murder; in 1939, a man is visited by the ghost of a woman who died in his home decades ago; and in Looking Back at Me, a driver comes upon a grisly highway accident involving a family whose car he had been following.

Not all these 15 tracks are so dark -- Hayden still finds room to write about love and his cats and summer and travelling.

Even so, after Elk-Lake Serenade, we're not going to go camping with him anytime soon.

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[[+3]] Friday, May 14, 2004

Hayden's dark Serenade