“I see those empty whisky bottles / And records scattered on the floor / And from the next room I hear crying / Then I remember the night before”
-Lee Hazlewood
“Nächstes Mal Werde Ich Weniger Trinken”
-Hering
Ah, remorse, followed by the promise from the heart to turn things around. However, excepting epiphany, things rarely change, for better or worse, for us, no matter how pure our promises or how determined our will. “What has been will be again,” we read in Ecclesiastes. No wonder a resume is a good gauge for employers: to see what a prospect has done and to see what a prospect will do.
Hering seems to know a thing or two about remorse, evidenced by “Nächstes Mal Werde Ich Weniger Trinken” and its low-spirited surfaces of warbles, bends, and clips. The surfaces, if not for their deterioration, might have rested in the calming waters of new age. Instead, the production, with its clouds of astigmatism, causes turbulence. It is a languid turbulence, mild and melancholy - a dead man’s float. It is funereal: hinting at a frown on an otherwise peaceful expression on a perished person. The waters are deep with regret. What could have been will not be.
The burial is one shovelful of dirt shy from completion, and, once complete, the feeling of remorse will fossilize.
• Hering und seine sieben Sachen: http://laichoflove.bandcamp.com
• SicSic Tapes: http://www.sicsic.de