Songdog - Haiku

If 2001's superb The Way Of The World was a fittingly damaged, literary affair for a songwriter in thrall to the Beats, Brel and Dylan, Haiku ups the ante with more extreme, nerve-jarring tales of love and sex in all its obsessive, voyeuristic, clammy glory.

Award-winning playwright and frontman Lyndon Morgans' acute, tragic-comic heart-letting is never less than captivating, be it salivating over the girl in HMV from behind a Lara Croft cut-out, pining for a girl who's bogged off with a "cutie in clean chinos... and big joy in his jeans" ("Hat-Check Girl") or being horrified about a husband murdered with the spike of a shoe. Delivered over gorgeously understated guitars, strings and bowed bass in a desperate, lurching voice, Morgans' near-suicidal anguish makes for oddly liberating listening.

Rating: 4 / 10