Maximilian Hecker – One Day
(CD / LP / Digital
Louisville)
Music so sweet it may save lives if played at the right moment.
Maximilian Hecker has been taking detours over various continents to hone
his pop-production- and –songwriting-craft. It is quite clear where he is
headed towards from the first song on his fifth album. “The space that
you’re in” is a bittersweet lovesong, with all the ingredients you would
wish for: a string section mixed with various other classical instrument, a
chorus melody so sweet and melancholic it takes you away on romantic
dreamtravels and a production so full and wide that you start looking for a
word that transcribes cinemascope into audio. Song two on the album, aptly
called “Misery” though it is somewhat upbeat with its electric guitar
and heavy drums, shows that he is now ready to take on the pop-championship.
I am not talking about mediocre mainstream pop a lá Coldplay but the full
range of pop-king: Richard Ashcroft. I, at least, haven’t heard
pop-visions as grande and as uninhibited since the first two solo albums by
Ashcroft.
Hecker takes a different route, as he always would. Using
weary-eyed, submerged singing and even those awful Seventies-tv-series
glockenspiel sounds on “Miss Underwater”, imitates late Eighties
melodies on “Summerwaste” (A-Ha or Nik Kershaw, I cannot yet decide) and
does other unspeakable things during the course of this album. In a
nutshell, he’ll use any kind of sound, even a steel guitar, if it fits.
And last but definitely not least his lyrics seem to become more and more
abstract – so as not to call them weird – with time. He likes to remain
in the dreamy, melancholic, sad pace of late Sunday afternoon on top. But
the most important thing, the in more than one way magical thing is, that it
works. Even with an old noisehead and ex-punkrocker like me, his pop music
hits a button and leaves me wide open and welcome. Maybe it is all about my
suppressed memories of growing up in the Eighties, who will ever know, but
at the moment I don’t care. I just want to close my eyes, imagine I am
still a teenager and all the problems of the world are loaded on my
shoulders, and have Hecker help me softly sweep them away one by one.
I know, that usually I cannot be easily guided into saying
something nice about the Eighties (what is nice about neon-colours, AIDS and
the fear of the atomic bomb?) but if you put me in the right mood I may
admit about some things. And Hecker is able to put me in just the mood to
mention a few things that I liked about the decade I lived through my
puberty in, like pop music. After beat and rock’n’roll and disco and
funk had vanished the time was right for synthie-pop and elusive melodies
again. Melodies that of course had their roots in the two or three decades
that preceded them, and also the whole pop circuit was sidelined by heavy
metal on the one side and industrial on the other side. Everybody seems to
be all revved up about Lloyd Cole these days, for some reason, and “One
Day” might be one of them.
So, after all and taking all of the above into account, Hecker
might be headed into a completely different direction and is straight on the
way to become the James Taylor of the digital age. Nothing bad about that,
actually, I like the first Taylor-albums as much as anybody (and also Carole
King, Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell or Bill Withers, to be honest) and
after all he has penned a few songs that will stay in the canon of modern
songwriting for ever without ever becoming kitschy or pathetic. Which in
itself is basically more than 99.9 % of all songwriters of the last five
years have done. I cannot say which of the songs on “One Day”, if any,
will ever reach that status, because that is for the next decades to show.
