Pitchfork

Maximilian Hecker is an underachiever cloaked as an overachiever. The career of this 23-year-old Berliner started by standing in the dim corners of some of his hometown's most scenster-y clubs. From those corners, he moved on to the stage to perform Oasis covers. Apparently, people found this endearing and, as well as finding time to insert some original material in amongst the covers, he became a male model. To the Viva modeling agency, Hecker is the very essence of the 'poor sweet shy-boy thing,' and it's evident in his music.

Infinite Love Songs, his debut album, is crammed to the gills with songs that Hecker would love to die to. This is Hecker's expressed intention: to create songs of such beauty that the listener will be vaporized into non-existence. Perhaps it says something about my tenacity rather than the relative strength of Hecker's skills, but I'm still alive and shuffling after many listens to his record.

My survival is not entirely indicative of Hecker's failure to promote self-extinction in me. In fact, opener "Polyester" did make me consider throwing myself in front of an oncoming Good Humor van. The only reason I haven't topped myself is because I can't think of a graceful enough way to send myself off into oblivion having absorbed the extreme swooping beauty of "Polyester" for one last time.

As Hecker recorded Infinite Love Songs at home, it's not surprising that his performances are intimate and comfortable. His acoustic guitar lines have become as familiar to me as the pattern of my bedroom wallpaper, and the way his falsetto reaches for sublimity as comfortable as my duvet. The Beatles-derived piano ballad "The Days Are Long and Filled with Pain" sends me to my teenage years, wrestling with inner conflicts and acne. Yet the winsomely crooned "Green Night" falters because Hecker borrowed EMF's drum machine. The resulting rhythm is as predictable as a stopped clock, and forces the listener to consider all the more deeply the banal ache of his lyrics. "Polyester," by contrast, redeems itself when Hecker repeatedly mumbles in malevolence, "I'm using gloves." But that slightly imaginative sophistication falls apart during the boiled-until-flavorless "Today," a sappy plea for maternal love on the day that Hecker plans to kill himself.

"Cold Wind Blowing" is a return to innocence-- gently plucked guitar chords form a soft bed for Hecker to sing about his mental state in meteorological metaphors and observes that "there's no place to hide." The title track is a feistier affair (and Hecker's most pronounced incorporation of the electronic sounds for which the Kitty-Yo label is best known). Even so, Hecker never reaches the eerie amalgam of classic pop and synthesized sound that James Combs did on Please Come Down. Combs' album takes pop hooks and falsetto ache to a new imaginative level, whereas Hecker isn't willing to commit to more than commonplace longing.

What I find frustrating about Infinite Love Songs is that I see great potential here-- Hecker has the chops to challenge his older, less foppish rivals-- but only after he's progressed beyond narcissistic tenth-grade poetry. To achieve that, he's got to experience more and renounce being a model agency's dreamy lost boy, self-consciously conspicuous in his corner, practicing his Gallagher moves. And my remaining alive after spinning this album so many times should give Hecker every reason not to fail me next time.