This compilation is mostly one for serious Tim Hecker heads and completists only, as it collects an array of unreleased pieces and alternate versions from his recent soundtrack work for television and film (La Tour, Luzifer, The North Water, and Brandon Cronenberg's killer Infinity Pool). Since Infinity Pool already got its own album, it only appears here for a sibilant and synthy extended variation of “Joyride,” but Shards also packs a trio of solidly upper-tier pieces unavailable elsewhere and an array of intriguingly uncharacteristic stylistic elements. Some stylistic departures work better than others, but the most damning thing I can say about the weaker pieces is that they either sound like lost interludes from a previous album or the beginnings of a future masterpiece that has not yet been shaped into its final, ideal form.
The album opens strong, as the haunting and hallucinatory “Heaven Will Come“ feels like an elegiac blurring together of Hecker’s Virgins and Anoyo eras: glassy, darkly angelic synths smear, dissolve, and strain heavenward over groaning chord swells. The album's biggest surprise comes next, as “Morning (Piano Version)” resembles a wistful Harold Budd-led jazz trio before a swell of haunting strings slowly morphs into a buzzing, gnarly crescendo that sounds like an incoming fax from a demon who does not really keep up with modern technological advances.
The album’s aforementioned would-be masterpiece follows, as “Monotone 3” cycles through several different motifs like a medley held together only by a fitfully fluttering woodwind motif. I am not a fan, but if Hecker had stuck with the gorgeously rippling zither/harp-like opening theme and swapped out the woodwinds for snarling saxophone flamethrowing, I would probably be writing about how that song blew me out of my goddamn chair right now instead. Elsewhere, the closing “Sunset Key Melt” is the album’s zenith, as its gently and blearily tumbling hiss-veiled melody sounds like the flickering mirage of a delicate Andrew Chalk piece being slowly enveloped by a gnawing swell of roiling distortion. When it fully blossoms, it evokes nothing less than a feedback-streaked sky of shimmering hallucinatory birds slowly fluttering above a burning city.
