Tim Hecker
Shards
KRANKY
Tim Hecker has been on a lifelong artistic journey for almost three decades. There are artists who view each album they create as a distinct entity that deserves to be appreciated in its own right. But this genre-spanning compositional genius from Vancouver—now 50 years old—stays planted at the loom with his latest release, Shards. While it’s conservatively classified as an EP at 31 minutes long, the piano-directed, ephemera-ensconced seven songs included here feel like a placid if not seamless segue from “Living Spa Water,” the atmospheric last song on 2023’s No Highs, into the Shards opener “Heaven Will Come,” its sinister and haunting undertones notwithstanding.
For the sake of arguing nomenclature—always the sexiest topic of discussion in a record review—Shards is most likely classified as an EP because it culls together music Hecker wrote for various movie and TV soundtracks composed in recent years, principally among them one of the most intriguing sci-fi/horror films from the 21st century thus far, Infinity Pool. But what’s the difference? When you listen to a Mogwai record (on which Hecker’s piano take on “Morning” would fit comfortably, by the way), do you obsess over trying to recall which visual production it may have accompanied? Does John Carpenter give a fuck about the methodology behind his albums, LPs which treat the music he made for his films on the same level as the music that came after his retirement?
The point here is twofold. For one, Hecker, like a filmmaker who just achieved auteur status, has graduated to the level of Steve Reich and the other aforementioned artists whose work should now be considered an oeuvre instead of merely a collection of records. Second, don’t slough off Shards—even if final tracks “Joyride Alternate” and “Sunset Key Melt” simmer into the ether—as a completists-only EP of movie and TV recordings. Rather, this is as worthy a mile-marker on the journey on which Hecker is taking us as any proper LP.
