- Hird is 21-year-old Christoffer Berg, a man who seems to have reached an extraordinary level of musical maturity in a very short time.
Just listening to the opening ‘Fading Blues’ is enough. It’s a brave move to open an album with a beatless torch song, but it works here, thanks chiefly to the sensational vocal from Koop’s Yukimi Nagano. Whilst it’s an exaggerated vocal it’s also deeply felt.
Nagano also appears in the following ‘Keep You Kimi’, a more up tempo track closer to Hird’s natural style, a kind of nu-jazz / lite house hybrid. That doesn’t mean the music is insubstantial – far from it, as ‘Getting Closer’ shows perfectly. This is the perfect beach house song, with dreamy keyboard lines and deep beats, all behind the simple line “you gotta get closer to the one that you love”. On a similar tip is ‘I Love You My Hope’, richly funky but this time perhaps a little too sentimental.
Berg’s enthusiasm for his music rubs off on the listener, and he knows when the time is right for more improvised stuff. ‘Buddy Rich’ gets rid of any blueprint and proceeds to let rip impressively – don’t try this drumming at home, unless you value your neighbours! More soul, meanwhile, is added to ‘Burn 4’ and ‘Under My Bridges’.
Since Royksopp reached public consciousness two years ago, and every TV programme as a result it seems, there has been a lot of substandard down temp stuff hitting the record stores. Hird’s ‘Moving On’ is most definitely above standard, a vibrant and uplifting album yet chilled at the same time. He has a great future ahead of him.