Theo Hakola makes music because he loves music. By the same token, Theo Hakola only records albums that he wants to listen to. Dubbed “Baudelaire with an electric guitar” by The New Musical Express at the time of his second band Passion Fodder (five albums, 1985-1991), he persists and signs, as they say in French, nine new songs on this new one. Indifferent to the noise of present fashions: he makes Hakola music, forever cutting his rocks with the same old guitar band tools, forever faithful to his tastes and convictions. That said, it could be that his works have become a tad more organic with time, infused as they are with an intricate instrumentation often impossible to decipher note by note, and every one of these gems lasts as long as it needs to in order to make its point – there’s always a point! – be it political or passional. In his “Cantique” profane, for example, we find him once again trumpeting the gospel of truth over waves of guitar feedback and bottlenecks, Hammond organ, and pizzicati that swing as much as they snap. More than a conductor, Hakola produces and plays the essential here. TRUTH and COMMON DECENCY features but two other musicians: “his” violinist Bénédicte Villain, of course, and the drummer Tatiana Mladenovitch, but it is also blessed by the silvery addition of several female voices (Brisa Roché, Lou Gala, and Raphaèle Bouchard) as well as that of an infant, a certain Louison who opens the first cut: “La Vie est belle” (sic).
Someday someone will take the time to dissect the preternatural layers and depth of Hakolian compositions and come up with a scholarly analysis of his lyrics, the subtlety and relevance, the humor, the pointed recurrences and the slew of real people and places that come to the poetic fore in this never-ending mix of love songs, political songs, political love songs, history, desire, longing and spleen et misère… Blues! Put them all together and you also have a kind of a brief history of his native land; thirty-four years after “Burn the Flag” – his masterful anthem to the glory of a certain America – Hakola continues to sing his despair, at once reasoned and shot full of hate, as he faces off with Trump, Vance, and Musk in the album’s b-side trilogy summarized for lazy listeners in a fourth song – the lament titled “Oh... (Twenty Twenty-F***ing-Four).”
Anyway… Thanks to TRUTH and COMMON DECENCY, his tenth solo album wherein The Velvet Underground's “Heroin” sups with Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Jorge Semprun, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell… we should be able to hold on until the delivery of next year’s 33 revolutions-per-minute comes to orbit the axes fixed by Hakola in a life-long vision of rock and roll – he’s old! – as he continues to soar at the old-school pace of one album a year.
