Once, in “Domino”, Tom Hessler, aka The Assistant, counts down: “First we play six, five, four, three, then just us.” Then he reports about the falling stones, but of course the song is not about the domino game at all, but of togetherness. Hessler does what he is so good at with these twosomes: he lays them out roughly, behind a frosted glass pane that leaves viewers with all the possibilities of interpretation in the world.
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That goes with the music, which also holds back when it comes to using wooden hammers: Hessler, known to some from the Hamburg group Fotos, has developed a pop for his solo debut, the subtle beautiful sound between Steely Dan and “Peter Strohm” title melody once through the offbeat Thermomix and is never afraid of losing the ground under his feet: he walks ahead, his head in the clouds.
It’s worth walking along, because that’s the only way to discover nice, little pop details like the warm thumping of the organ in “W” (which Hessler only serves as the lowest register for all sorts of soft-funk smuts) or the equal reference to the past and Future-sounding keyboard melody in “Man Without a Past”. “I have time for your time,” The Assistant once said. We should do the same the other way around.
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