Tim Hecker – No Highs

Tim Hecker has always been good at giving definition to his work. Despite dealing in the abstractions of drone, ambient and minimal noise he has always roamed enough within that to create a distinct identity for each of his albums, be it the weightless desolation of Ravedeath, 1972 or the ecclesiastically piercing Virgins. However, on No Highs, Hecker’s first non-soundtrack album in four years, this focus goes lacking.

The album wilfully sinks into an aimlessness of its own design in an attempt to evoke the era in which we live. Its blown out drones, and rickety synth lines evoke dead horizons and husk cityscapes. However, unusually for Hecker, this is very well trodden ground, and the tracks do little to stand apart from those that have mined this vein before him, including his own earlier work. Where it attempts to hover and glower ominously it often merely sits sulking.

This is Tim Hecker though so there are still moments of tremendous beauty to be found on the record. The swoops of scraped strings that wrench across Total Garbage work beautifully, and Colin Stetson’s undulating saxophone contribution to Monotony II gives a much needed sense of movement and physicality. When it aims for the ecstatic it works well, but it doesn’t colour its muted periods with anything like the precision, the uneasy vistas it is aiming for never quite forming.

Listen to: Total Garbage, Monotony II, Sense Suppression