MAXIMILIAN HECKER - Lady Sleep

Maximilian Hecker is back. We had left him two years ago, a dandy with an irreparably broken heart, clutching a rose's thorns until his hand bled.

We'd seen him live, close to disowning that image, almost thrown off balance by the pathos that some of his songs could conjure on record.

We find him today, grown up. "Lady Sleep" is the classic "mature" record, a category as elusive as it is historic and evergreen in the imagination of music criticism.

There's a change of producer, first of all. Gareth Jones is out, replaced by the less overbearing Guy Sternberg, who had handled the recording on "Rose". One can assume Maximilian decided to put his trust in someone who would explain how to achieve certain sounds rather than someone who would tell him what to do. What he gets is the kind of record that will strike some as more cohesive and others as too samey. Hecker, in fact, focuses almost exclusively on high-drama ballads, dropping nearly all the quick-fix pop temptations and the Eighties references that had dotted his two previous efforts.

The exuberant depression of "Rose" (the easier record to love) steps aside to let Hecker do what he does best within the space of a song: being simultaneously a climber of torch songs and a deep-sea diver of the human soul. And the doubt in "Lady Sleep" becomes a certainty: Maximilian Hecker's songs desperately need to be believed, or else you're left feeling utterly alienated from everything passing under the laser. Like all melodrama (and his are four-minute melodramas), the line with the ridiculous is dangerously close. If the artist doesn't cross it, there's always a chance the listener won't be in the right frame of mind.

Sometimes, it must be said, Hecker tries all too blatantly to reproduce the perfect, magical balance of "Kate Moss", the song that broke hearts on "Rose", ending up sounding a little too close to his previous work. Other times, though, while still staying in adjacent territory, he shows with real class what he's capable of, as when he populates the brief instrumental interlude of opener "Birch" with Viennese ghosts, just seconds before letting the wounds the song carries inside burst open.

After the intriguing "Anaesthesia" and a string of decent ballads, the album steps up a level with "Full Of Voices". Hecker prefers to stick with an arrangement consistent with the rest of the record rather than give in to the vintage Eighties-style instrumentation that the song seems to beg for at every note, and he wins that bet.

Next comes the enchanting pairing of "Help Me" and "Snow", the perfect soundtrack for cities suddenly turned white. "Help Me" opens muffled, hazy, as white as a morning over winter trees. It quotes Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack" and wins you over by building atmosphere. "Snow", a serenade to sing to oneself below zero, ties in spirit to the freezing beauty of "Dying", which leaves no more room for imagination, no more room for consolation. The only line of the lyric is explicit: "I'm dying". This trio holds the best of the record, its strength, as well as proof of just how well Hecker can leave us speechless, speaking to our own pain by writing about his.

"Yeah, Eventually She Goes" is the only track where the guy lets the guitars off the leash, creating that abrasive wall of sound already heard on "Cold Wind Blowing" (from "Infinite Love Songs"), as well as on "My Friends" and the title track of "Rose". Here he also unveils a vocal delivery surprisingly close to Jonsi of Sigur Rós (fellow troublemakers of feeling).

Closing things out is the song "Lady Sleep", dedicated to sleep as existence's sole moment of joy. The tone softens too, with an ending entrusted to a music-box solo. But before that comes an unsettling question, which reveals the true meaning of his love for that "Lady Sleep" who, it's now clear, permeates the whole record: "When, eventually, will you stay forever?" ("Rose" closed in similar fashion: "My life is over – It is over").

All that's left now is to hope he stops being ashamed of the heart-wrenching beauty of his finest compositions.

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30/04/2026