THE "BAUDELAIRE OF ROCK IS BACK! Novelist, actor, producer, journalist, photographer, poet, world traveler and one-time political activist, it’s an understatement indeed to say that the various personas coming together in the willowy frame of Theo Hakola are... many. Still, it’s surely as a maker of music that we know him best ever since his resounding beginnings with Orchestre Rouge (2 albums, RCA) and Passion Folder (5 albums, Barclay-Polygram/Beggars Banquet) in the 1980s. Now, his eighth solo album, Water is Wet, like the gentle irony of its title – a trompe-l’oeil reference to today’s epidemic resistance to the vital Orwellian necessity of distinguishing truth from lies – is here to tell us what’s what or what should be... Not to mention Hakola’s eternal sagas of love lived and love lost, ever rendered with an almost anachronistic charm built on the electric guitars and vocals of an improbable crooner running from the hard edge of Tom Verlaine to the honey of Chris Isaac, and whose work will always betray a familial link to that of Dylan and Nick Cave (some of whose Bad Seeds – no surprise – played on Hakola’s previous albums). From unabashedly joyous declarations of love and seduction shot full of historical references to my-baby-left-me blues and frontal political assaults rife with spleen, it all comes together to feed this album like so many tributaries of a river of longing. You can call it a way with words or the obsessions of a man who’s lived, the whole delivered in the impassive phrasing of a dandy from times past all and a touch of pissed-off sarcasm as he takes on our era and, most specifically, the political situation in his homeland, as he did in his last novel Idaho Babylone (Actes Sud - 2016). While there’s no denying water is wet, it’s clearly failed to douse the flame of Theo Hakola.
