Erik Hassle - Pieces
It will leave a cheesy taste in your mouth.
Sweden’s a wonderful, beautiful country filled with wonderful, beautiful people who are far more cultured and creative than their breakthrough pop acts would imply. I know this because I saw on a pilgrimage last year to Gothenburg, the hometown of my childhood heroes, Ace of Base. During my short visit, I attended an art gallery displaying a video of a cat circling a replica miniature art gallery, a selection of well-endowed cave paintings and an illegal metal club (frequented with genuine headbanging metal heads, as opposed to our lack-lustre imitations) high on suckable tobacco pouches. Anyway – when a reviewer goes off on a ramble about something that has no relevance what so ever to the thing they’re actually meant to be reviewing, it’s because they don’t have anything particularly good to say and, contrary to popular belief, we don’t feed off the tears of nubile young wannabe pop stars.
Erik Hassle seems to have missed out on the native beauty gene, visually falling somewhere between a Weasley brother attempting the Jedward haircut and the grinning imp boy from the cover of MAD magazine… attempting the Jedward haircut. As for the music, it’s got synths and self indulgently morose lyrics but something just doesn’t quite gel, neither striking an emotional chord nor hooking you with its insatiable catchiness. Is it the naff lyrics ("Don’t bring flowers after I’m dead/Save your giving for the living instead") or is it the bland vocals and formulaic song writing that are Hassle’s downfall? There’s something eerily soulless about 'Pieces', like staring into the vacant pupils of a wide-eyed corpse but without the inherent horror and only a fraction of the disgust. All in all, Pieces fails to register much of an impact at all - however, it will leave a cheesy taste in your mouth.
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