I am a bird now...

Traditionally an event jaundiced by willful obscurism, last year's Mercury Music Prize managed the unthinkable and actually championed a resonant gem.

Anthony Hegarty's I Am a Bird Now had escaped my interest until a few days ago (largely for the above reason) but it has literally not left my cd player since. A hex on my snootiness.

It is an absolutely phenomenal effort. Think Thom Yorke's fat androgynous misfit older brother channelling the spirit of Jeff Buckley and penning a haunting, gender-exploring, rite-of-passage album of piano ballads to die for. And then some.

Despite the manifold layers of introspection, the deeply personal rawness of the whole affair never once curdles to fat tranny epiphany. This is a soaring aria of self-deliverence: a rare, naked, brittle hymn to the singer's transmutative fantasy.

Anchoring the pained, surreal voyage from boy to girl to woman-bird to lucid flying entity, Hegarty's mellifluous, spectral vibrato is a thing of sheer beauty: a rich, glottal pulse which throws a loop of meaning around the prayer-like verses, charging them with a wondrous fragility.

It's really not on to use the phrase "achingly beautiful" anymore (take a bow, NME). So this is the last time. For the album is just that: a heavenly record worthy of considerable attention.