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Apr 14, 2023The palettes on offer are frequently gorgeous and sometimes even transcendent, but No Highs' pervasive gloom and downer vibes render it more standoffish than the lofty fear and trembling of Ravedeath or the playful eclecticism of Radio Amor.
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Apr 12, 2023Once the album’s 50 minutes have elapsed, one feels a sense of satisfied exhaustion in having traversed a musical landscape both desolate and majestic.
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Apr 11, 2023The complexities of No Highs are masked by its minimalism. Hecker pairs expansive and bright songs with more repetitive compositions, capturing the beauty in uneasiness and vice versa, and keeping the album from blurring into an ambient haze.
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The WireApr 7, 2023No Highs is a soundtrack for knotted stomachs – introverted, devoid of catharsis and all the more moving for its honesty and restraint. [Apr 2023, p.54]
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Apr 7, 2023Hecker seems to want you on guard, braced for cataclysm. Nerves fray, discords linger, that sense of panic accumulates and draws you helplessly in. And this allusive, wordless album starts to feel eerily modern and big.
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Apr 7, 2023There are no crescendos or sections that wrestle for attention, but rather, an ever-shifting soundscape that swirls and swims like a starling murmuration. The shapes it makes in the air are often wounding, but also graceful. And like all of his work, it is devastating in the best way possible.
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Apr 11, 2023No Highs ultimately works as an example of what ambient music can be, rather than a suggestion of where it might go.
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Apr 27, 2023While his music generally fits under the category of ambient, it's never been the type of safe, soothing ambient solely meant to function as background music. ... No Highs especially focuses on dealing with depression, anxiety, and isolation, and its pieces often feel nervous and unbalanced.
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UncutApr 7, 2023A bleakly beautiful record that smuggles moments of elation into its ambient dread. [May 2023, p.28]
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Apr 7, 2023The album serves as a continued refinement of the talents that he displayed on 2006’s immense Harmony in Ultraviolet and 2016’s confrontational Love Streams, even if it’s ultimately not as consistent. Its atmosphere is so suffocating that “Anxiety” may accurately sum up most listeners’ emotional states after listening to the album in full—and considering No Highs’s ambitions, that’s perhaps the highest possible praise one could bestow upon it.
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Apr 7, 2023When 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.