Thruth And Common Decency

Description

Theo Hakola makes music because he loves music and Theo Hakola records albums that he wants to listen to. He is indifferent to the rumors of fashion: he created hakolian music and that is why he tirelessly digs his own furrow, true to his tastes and convictions. "Baudelaire with an electric guitar" according to the New Musical Express at the time of his second band Passion Fodder (1985-1991), he persists and signs here nine new songs. Increasingly organic, they are nourished by intricate instrumentations that are difficult to decipher note by note. They last as long as they need to last - never less than four minutes - and go straight to the point. In his sights, he targets, among other things in a profane "Cantique," the truth that he serenades with feedback, bottlenecks, waves of Hammond organ or pizzicati, melodies and riffs, carried by rhythmic variations that swing as much as they snap. For several years, in addition to being at the helm, Hakola is increasingly at the controls. TRUTH and COMMON DECENCY welcomes only two female musicians: "his" violinist Bénédicte Villain of course, and drummer Tatiana Mladenovitch. To top it all off and illuminate his own voice, Hakola also called upon several singers (Brisa Roché, Lou Gala, and Raphaèle Bouchard) and it is the voice of a baby (female) that launches the first song "Life is Beautiful" (sic). One would like, one day, to take the time to dissect the strange richness of hakolian compositions. One should, one day, write a scholarly analysis of hakolian lyrics, highlight their finesse and relevance, emphasize their humor and inventiveness, count the recurrences and proper names... instead of merely classifying them as political love songs or love political songs. One could also, by recycling his work, write a brief history of his homeland: thirty-four years after his masterful anthem "Burn the Flag," a reasoned catalog of the most glorious pages written by the USA, Hakola spits his despair as hateful as it is reasoned at the faces of Trump, Vance, and Musk in a trilogy that he summarizes, for lazy listeners, in the bitter observation of a fourth song simply titled "Oh... (Twenty Twenty-F***ing-Four)." Thanks to TRUTH and COMMON DECENCY, his tenth solo album in which the "Heroin" of the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Jorge Semprun, T. S. Eliot, and George Orwell intersect, we will patiently wait for the next singular revolutions of the spiral of Theo Hakola around his fixed axes and according to his own rules - at the old-fashioned pace of an album each year.