Every man thy ear, few thy voice

Paul Buchanan's first album at 56
Mid Air is a collection of 13 ballads and an instrumental, recorded at some 3am of the soul, in the cell in the tower of song a few storeys above where Leonard Cohen is eternally recording Songs From A Room, Sinatra is composing “Where Are You?” and Tom Waits is working on Small Change. It barely rises above murmur and sigh, the clang of the night-train, the chime of the city clock, the foghorn from the docks.

It’s also, it almost goes without saying, magnificent. But here is a record that in its determinedly modest way – Buchanan describes it as a “record-ette” and apparently toyed with titling it “Minor Poets Of The Seventeenth Century” – matches their immaculate ’80s albums A Walk Across The Rooftops and Hats. It’s no great departure; it’s more like a refinement or elaboration of latent possibilities in the earlier music. In a way, Mid Air revisits the deep, still pool of Rooftops’ “Easter Parade” and explores the musical and emotional space as though it were a new ocean.

“Easter Parade”, in fact, always felt like the first draft of an ideal Blue Nile torch song, one that Buchanan pursued keenly down the years, across the classic early B-side “Regret” (“It’s 3.30 and I’m thinking of you…”) , Hats’ “From A Late Night Train” and Peace At Last’s “Family Life”.

Mid Air amounts to 14 enigmatic variations on this mood, just piano, voice, the occasional pale moonbeam of orchestration, which miraculously never feels monotonous or morose. This is partly due to the songs’ brevity (none lasts more than three minutes) and the spare neon-haiku imagism of Buchanan’s words. The title track lists “the buttons on your collar, the colour of your hair”, like the ingredients in a spell to conjure someone’s presence, while “Wedding Party” is not much more than a handful of snapshots – “tears in the carpark”, “a long walk in the wrong dress”, “I was drunk when I danced with the bride” – that seem to condense lifetimes of regret. But it’s also down to Buchanan’s peerlessly evocative croon. From a country known for its bluster and bravado (from the sublime – Billy Mackenzie – to the ridiculous – Jim Kerr), Buchanan signifies heartsick soul-storms with little more than the muttered, broken “yeah…” that closes the final song, “After Dark”.

It is an effortless portrait of life in all its simple glories and heartaches. Remarkably wonderful.