Darren Hayes: 'This Delicate Thing We've Made'

Two discs. 25 songs. An hour and 53 minutes of dense, claustrophobic synth-pop. And one defiant V-sign to the music industry. Darren Hayes – a man who sold 23 million albums as half of Aussie soft rock duo Savage Garden – has founded his own record label, invested in a 1983 Fairlight CMI synthesiser, and fashioned the most audacious pop album of the year. A bit of a leap from “I knew I loved you before I met you”, isn’t it?

With its thumping, Trevor Horn-style drum sounds, layers of menacing synths and fearless pop smarts, This Delicate Thing We’ve Made is clearly an homage to Hayes’ eighties pop heroes. He offers nods to Peter Gabriel, Prince, Madonna, Annie Lennox and, most frequently, Kate Bush, but he never channels his idols lazily. In fact, what’s striking is Hayes’ ability to imagine his heroes in new, unexpected musical settings. ‘Casey’, a touching ode to a childhood mentor, nicks the ‘Cloudbusting’ trick of building a rhythm track around staccato string bursts, but combines them with insistent beats to create a euphoric four-to-the-floor anthem. It’s unlikely that Kate Bush will ditch domestic bliss for an assault on the commercial house market any time soon – the odds of June Whitfield giving up those equity release TV ads for a second career at Stringfellows are probably stronger – but Hayes impels you to imagine her 'avin it large at Cream, just for a second. Equally impressive are ‘Me, Myself and (i)’, which sounds a lost classic from Madonna’s American Life sessions, and ‘Sing To Me’, which proves that Hayes hasn’t lost his ability to pen a blubtastic ballad.

Sadly, This Delicate Thing is prone to sag under the weight of its stratospheric ambitions. ‘Future Holds’ slips uncomfortably into nu-metal territory, while the painfully earnest ‘Great Big Disconnect’ mounts an ill-advised attempt to invent a musical sub-genre all of its own: electro MOR. But the album’s only real stinker is ‘Listen All You People’, on which Hayes empathises with the world’s “unhappy wives, pregnant brides, geeks and queens” over a toe-tapping house beat and a crass major key chorus. It exists solely to soundtrack the WeightWatchers TV ads when we’ve all had enough of Cher and her bloody ‘Song For The Lonely’.

Ultimately, This Delicate Thing We’ve Made is as flawed as Jodie Marsh’s psychological profile. It’s at least ten songs too long, but this shouldn't present too much of a problem in the download era: savvy listeners will streamline Hayes’ wonky, rambling, self-possessed opus as much as they want. And it’s worth the effort, because his synth-pop obsession has thrown up some the year’s most thrilling pop moments. Who else would have the chutzpah - not to mention the skewed musical vision - to auteur a song like ‘How To Build A Time Machine’, which starts with a simple guitar loop, a hushed vocal and some folky guitar strums, before exploding into a riot of call-and-response vocals and enough electro blips to shame the Doctor Who sound effects department? This Delicate Thing won’t snare the Savage Garden fan-base – it’s an album destined to be obsessed over by the faithful - but Darren Hayes has never been this compelling.