Flight of fancy

CD CHOICE: PAUL BUCHANAN/ Mid AirNewsroom Records ****

You will be reminded of In the Wee Small Hours more than once on this magnificent and moving collection from the Blue Nile singer. But whereas Frank Sinatra’s classic was weighed down by emotional melodrama and sozzled self-pity, Mid Air is a softer- focused affair with more dramatic scope.

These 13 songs (most less than three minutes) and one instrumental feature vocals, piano and the odd hushed piece of orchestration. Variations on a musical theme, perhaps, but Buchanan covers quite some lyrical distance here, from bemused bystander to lacerated laureate.

Mid Air is not, and was never intended as, an ersatz Blue Nile album, though you do get the odd flashback due to the similarity of some of the imagery. Neither is it overly personal or confessional –

the songs arrive in nebulous form and are stroked into something cohesive without any overt sense of “meaning” or (shudder) “closure”. A lot of it is like listening in to a phone call between two very old friends.

Opener Mid Air is sublime; it comes and goes in a flash but leaves a vivid aftertaste. Such is the album’s pace that you don’t always know when one song ends and another begins – but perhaps that’s the effect Buchanan was after. His voice, incidentally, has never sounded better. There’s a new softness, and you really get the feeling that most times he’s actually forgotten that he’s being recorded, such is its languid and laconic styling.

Cars in the Garden sounds weirdly like the precise overlap between Tom Waits and Paddy McAloon – company in which Buchanan can more than hold his own. “Last out of the Newsroom, please put the lights out”, he sings on Newsroom, which Sky News should be using on its coverage of the Leveson enquiry.

The album’s primus inter pares is My True Country, which undulates beautifully around a poetic vista. Wedding Party, by contrast, has the bluntness of a Philip Larkin poem.

A small, modest and simple album? Don't be fooled, and don't drop your guard. Mid Air is like the Wizard of Oz in reverse. paulbuchanan.com

Download tracks: Mid Air, Wedding Party, My True Country, Cars in the Garden