This 29-minute, 9-track album is Aidan Casserly's third album release of 2016 and we're barely halfway through the year. Aidan wears his heart on his sleeve and this is a brief musical journey through both sadness and optimism, and as the prolific speed of his output might suggest, there's a raw, immediate, and in some places almost improvised feel to it.

It's predominantly works for solo piano, or solo piano with subtle orchestral accompaniment. There are some powerful melodies and heartfelt performances in there, that wouldn't seem at all out of place in a film score- mostly accompanying the end-of-Act-2 scenarios when the hero begins to worry that all is lost and that no rescue is possible. Some of the orchestration is impressively arranged, though on a couple of tracks, such as "Bullet Valentine", the extent to which synths can sound like genuine full live orchestras is just slightly over-stepped.

"Echoes Backward" is the first of two songs on the album, a very brief piano-and-voice number with an unusual melody which at some points sounds like it could potentially have been recorded backwards. The other vocal track is the album closer "My Father Sleeps", deeply raw and sorrowful in its lyrics yet moderately restrained in the musical arrangement, and once you reach it, you suddenly feel like the entire album has been gradually working towards this point, like this was the story all along. The pathos is strong and well earned.

Of the instrumentals, "Walking To Drift" stands out as a highlight, with its angry synthetic opening is a rare flourish of anger in an otherwise melancholic collection. "Eye Of Horus" with its broad ethnic feel and almost jazzy flute playing is worth a listen too, and could perhaps have spent longer with the flute and less with the piano.

This is a short but powerful bit of emotional self-expression from an artist who's far away from the synthpop home turf on which I first heard him. The only thing I don't like about it would be the bold artwork and faintly naff title "Music X", that seems over-simplistic, over-modern, and somehow at odds with the nuanced music.