Falco
Out of the Dark (Into the Light)

THE REVIEW

On February 6th, 1998, in Santo Domingo, Hans Hoelzel lost his life in a collision between his Pajero and a public bus.

Just over twenty days after Falco’s tragic death, EMI—sensing a business opportunity—hurled a posthumous album onto the market, “Out of the Dark (Into the Light).”

Three weeks, in the world of the music industry—in the literal sense of “the conception and production of musical media with related distribution”—are practically the blink of an eye. Especially if, in terms of content, you’re starting from scratch, or almost.

Because while it’s true that the label had a handful of tracks in the drawer from the previous two/three years—all promptly rejected—it’s equally true that there was no real release plan whatsoever, despite the six years since the previous album, Nachtflug.

Falco was, in fact, struggling with yet another deep creative crisis—not to mention a personal one—that left him artistically spinning his wheels.

In one of his last interviews—in mid-1997, with News Magazine—he was quite clear about this, stating that he had consigned ”in den mull” (to the trash) many songs written during those last years of Caribbean exile.

A vague notion regarding a new record project had nonetheless emerged, if only as a hypothesis: Falco actually sent a fax to his executive producer George Glueck, hand-writing a list of songs potentially eligible for publication. Little more than a working draft, probably, but EMI took it at face value and rapidly assembled a roughly forty-minute CD including most of this scant selection of tracks.

However, the running time is heavily padded by a series of “tricks,” such as including an extended version—over six minutes—of the track “Naked,” which had already been released as a CD single two years before. Or the several-minute pause between the last track listed on the CD’s back cover and an alleged “Ghost Track,” which was none other than a raw demo of a cover of a song by German singer Rio Reiser.

Also included on the fax—and thus on the disc—was a reworked version of the historic hit “Der Kommissar,” unpredictably reimagined in a noisy Big Beat style (see early Prodigy/Chemical Brothers) and in its “third life” after an initial rework from the early nineties.

Meanwhile, a mysterious “Tomorrow Never Knows” ended up excluded, which turned out to be the Beatles’ song, performed live by Falco at a charity event for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna held a few years earlier, never recorded in a studio and hence only available in live version.

“Out of the Dark (Into the Light)” was thus released in a rush with no more than six truly unreleased songs. The reason for this has to do with the very limited creative vein of an artist in serious difficulty.

Deprived of the specific support/partnership that he benefitted from in the past, despite many personality clashes (first Ponger, then the Bollands), Falco was unable to establish as fruitful a collaboration with the new producers with whom he began working during his “Techno phase.”

Left essentially alone as never before, he greatly struggled even in terms of output, recording very little material despite having a long period of time at his disposal.

Originally envisaged with a different title (“Egoisten”), the album commercially exploited the enormous emotional impact of his passing, eventually selling around 700,000 copies across Europe.

The track and videoclip for “Out of the Dark” were obsessively broadcast by radio stations and music TV channels. A song of overwhelming intensity and pathos, with lyrics that most considered “prophetic” due to certain lines that could be interpreted as alluding to imminent death. In reality, Falco wrote those verses over two years earlier, most likely once again referencing issues of physical dependencies (drugs) and emotional ones (a love). An “exit from the darkness into the light” probably meant as a sort of detoxification, or at least an attempt to clean up.

But this was clearly not functional to the marketing strategy, which aimed to ride the emotional wave of the tragic ending and commercially relaunch the “Falco-Brand.”

Musically, this particular track is among the few on the album to boast a sharp and effective refrain, while the verses are stylistically very similar to those of an earlier project produced by Torsten Borger (namely, “Warum” by the group Tic Tac Toe, whose lyrics were also focused on bereavement), which had been released only the previous year with significant commercial success in all German-speaking countries.

Another single was then released, “Egoist,” a spot-on track with Reggae vibes that was effectively reworked by the production team for its CD single and video release to enhance its commercial appeal.

The rest of the album, however, has little or nothing to offer in terms of significance. Between new dance excursions (the playful “Cyberlove”), dispensable songs based on scattered harsh guitars and processed vocals (“No Time for Revolution,” “Hit Me”), and dreadful failures like the ghastly “Shake”—without doubt the lowest point of Falco’s career—there’s not much worth saving.

This “Out of the Dark (Into the Light),” as brought forth by EMI, is the bitter and indigestible fruit of an industry’s inevitable craving to cash in as quickly as possible.

Nowhere near being considered a chapter comparable to any of his previous albums, it can rather be seen as representative of the last, melancholic phase of Falco’s artistic arc, marred by annihilating factors such as painful isolation—personal as well as “logistical”—a lack of faith in his own expressive possibilities, and inspiration at rock bottom.

How might things have gone, without that car crash? Would Hans Hoelzel have managed to take back control of his career and his life?

No one can know.

The fact remains that, in the most optimistic of scenarios—but truly bordering on utopia—this is an “unfinished” work.

Yet probably, “inopportune” is the term that frames it best.