Tim Hecker’s first album for 4AD is a beauty. He is essentially an experimental electronic artist, but has described some of his output as ‘fake church music’ – and it’s easy to see why here. Some of the shady detail in the textures evokes the darker corners of a large building, while elsewhere it sounds like he has briefly been let lose to improvise on a church organ. Yet ‘Love Streams’ doesn’t ramble incoherently despite its freedom, and has a number of moments where shafts of sunlight pierce the cloudy textures, especially in numbers like ‘Violet Monumental’. ‘Voice Crack’ has moments of rarefied beauty too, like a choir suspended in mid-air, while ‘Black Phase’ fades out darkly. Meanwhile in ‘Live Leak’ it feels as though we have moved into a large space – again one with lots of reverb like a church. Hecker’s mixture of light and shade is one of the essential elements in the success of ‘Love Streams’, which provides ambience but at the same time tests the mind set as it moves between moods.
5 out of 5
Reviewed by Ben Hogwood
