Ravedeath, 1972

Complex and rewarding in a way that the telescoping salvia trip of An Imaginary Country never was, and tougher and more fibrous than the excellent Haunt Me Haunt Me, Do It Again, Ravedeath, 1972 somehow manages to soothe even as it disorients.

What resulted is ultimately an album of destructive beauty. Elegance married with sonic destruction!

It might lack the narrative arc of 09's An Imaginary Country, but it's hard to imagine that 2011 will see many finer releases, of any genre.

It makes its own statement, and it does so with the level of maturity and succinctness that we've come to expect from Hecker, an artist who has well earned his place as a leader amongst his peers.

That idea, the notion of music as a cheapened, battered object, touches nearly every aspect of Ravedeath, 1972, a dark and often claustrophobic record that is arguably Hecker's finest work to date.

The album has almost Wagnerian scope and immersive power, and at just over 50 minutes it's well organised as a start-to-finish listen. [Mar 2011, p.50]

Very sad and very beautiful. [Apr 2011, p.100]

His primary source is a pipe organ in an Icelandic church, which he processes, filters, deconsecrates, muddles and distorts, and therefore liberates in the course of this album, enabling its latent potential to escape from its wooden room and form a burgeoning cloudscape. [Apr 2011, p.83]

Each of Hecker's layers are shards, something incomplete, but with just enough shards, a fragmented, disturbed image is formed, and that is the result of Ravedeath, 1972.

While it definitely is more static and sustain, you really need to turn this up, put down whatever else you're doing, and connect with it in the moment, as this is very present music. It feels like a refined version of his past esthetics, and is more intense for the limitations he has decided to work under.

His inventive and affective pairing of resonating melodies and noise is impossible to deconstruct--that is to say, narrow down to a specified meaning or reason behind each piece. We, the listener, get to apply each of Hecker's abstractions to whichever feeling we choose. That's definitely an ocean worth diving into.

The overall effect of Ravedeath, 1972 is a balance between sheer sonic wooziness and a focused sense of construction; nothing seems wholly random in each song's development even as the feeling can be increasingly disorienting.

Hecker's latest seems to ultimately be about making peace with our mortality, and as such is his most powerful album yet.

Generally speaking that's good enough, especially since trying to find specific meaning in this kind of music is a largely futile exercise that I and others at CMG still occasionally agonize our way through against our better judgment. Perhaps the appeal of this music lies in nothing more or less than how painstakingly moulded it is, and in that respect Hecker will probably always release really impressive records.

It has many of the same sounds and instruments he relies upon-mauled pianos, organs, and guitars, mostly-but the way they're structured within the songs and as part of the whole are new. The record seems to have no center, no shining single moment, no climax or vortex. Instead it hovers lightly but ominously, like the notes in the songs themselves, hanging in midair without ever dropping to the floor.