No Highs - Tim Hecker: Review
Tim Hecker
is a Canadian ambient musician with two decades of critically acclaimed albums and compositions under his belt. While he's scored two movies in recent years, No Highs is his first studio album since 2019's Anoyo which was a spiritual successor to the shrill synth sounds of Konoyo before it.
Review by Lav:
Any time I get to review a big new ambient release, it's a win for me as the genre is perhaps my favorite in all of music and Tim Hecker specifically is one of its strongest and most consistently impressive composers. Though this album had one great single it didn't even really need that to get me hyped. Tim Hecker has been great even as he wanders away from the dark and cloudy ambient sounds he made his name off of, so turning on this album and finding out he's returned to his bread and butter felt like a slam dunk. And it was, this is going to be one of my favorite albums of the year.
Let's fast forward to that lead single, which highlights exactly what both Hecker and this record in particular do well. Lotus Light has some cinematic elements that stretch beyond the purely ambient, primarily the more tangible instrumentation throughout. The song doesn't particularly drive through its composition in a dramatic way like a post-rock song would, instead providing many fleeting moments of separate intensity which start to build on each other over time. It's a fascinating way to compose an ambient song that still sounds so exciting to me listen after listen.
We can take another shortcut to the album's next experiment in composition on the amazing Anxiety which is a pure masterclass in layering. In a less technically adept hand the plucky loop that absolutely soars over everything in this song would become the entire track itself. But Hecker has nestled some distant long drones in the margins of the track and they can actually be quite harsh if you really dig into them. The thing is, they fit in so seamlessly as the song methodically builds around its core loop that you might not even notice. It's a fascinating way to arrange ambient music that absolutely grabs me by my throat and holds on throughout.
Since the album is obviously an instrumental it doesn't dig deeply into any particular themes, though the song titles all seem to dabble in mental health struggles and the dark, hazy, and difficult-to-pin-down tones of the record match that. Opening track Monotny begins with these bouncy synth leads and this buzzing layer of background distortion that contrast each other well and feel like they're building to something right away. It really becomes a cloudy journey and there's so much textured space to get enveloped in that you might even forget about the walls of pulsating noise that have also surrounded you. The track has a part II later on the album which is the song I was looking forward to hearing given it sports some Colin Stetson saxophone. Hecker's more methodical synth lines play the foundation for the song while Stetson's saxophone wanders exploratively through the space at times with blistering technicality and other times more acidic chaos. One thing I'm thankful for is that it never reaches the absolute blaring intensity Colin can achieve at points in his own compositions because the more muted and meditative sound is really in line with what the rest of this record does so well.
One thing I really appreciate about the record is the fluid way that songs transition in and out of each other, particularly in the first half when some of the shorter tracks bridge the gap between longer outings. Glissalia turns the opening track's arrangement of synths into a much brighter but no less dense sound with layers upon layers at work here. It then transitions seamlessly into Total Garbage which is perhaps as close to intense as you could call any ambient song. With new synth lines introduced and piled on top of one another throughout much of the first half and a high contrast chilling fade out at the end, it's certainly an attention grabber.
The middle point on the record is where some of the shorter tracks take hold and start to explore their own personalities more. Pulse Depression is a standout despite being one of the most muted songs on the record. The track does have a pulse to it, but it's so quickly enveloped in the clouds of noise that it eventually fades out entirely before what sounds like some kind of deeply distorted blaring horn or crashing bell just knocks everything else down in the second half. Winter Cop is the closest the album gets to a more classically "ambient" sound and yet Hecker still does it in a way that feels uniquely haunting. Once again it gets back to the cloudiness at the core of everything, making it impossible to ground yourself anywhere as the music just completely envelopes you.
Not all of the shorter tracks are particularly distinctive. In Your Mind feels like a shorter microcosm of the formula behind some of the longer tracks here. It presents a combo of these booming elastic synth hits played right in the foreground and this gentle skittering little percussion loop buried deeper in the mix. The drums are played to persistently that you can kind of always feel them there which is an interesting element to the song, but not exactly a revelation. Sense Suppression is the only song on the album that feels functional, since the closing track is so sonically different than anything that came before it on the record this shorter track feels like set-up more than anything else.
Let's talk about that closing track. While I wouldn't describe the rest of the album as feeling particularly mechanical, Living Spa Water is uniquely naturalistic in the tracklist. You can pretty vividly picture the scenery it paints in the beginning of its runtime and imagine the particular decay it undergoes at various points throughout the song. Despite standing out, it's a discrepancy that I never minded hearing at the end of the album.
No Highs is another wonderful outing from Tim Hecker and one of his best in years. The high contrast presented throughout the record of its cloudy walls of sound and often surprisingly persistent synth loops is an impressive tightrope walk that Hecker makes throughout most of the record. The seamless blending from one track to another makes it feel like a purely holistic album experience, often wrapped in haunting expressions of formless sound that can simultaneously feel sparse, but also inescapable. Hecker's eye for compelling textures and layering is as sharp as ever and this is sure to be one of the best ambient albums of the year. 8.5/10
Check out some more ambient reviews I did last year here
