Tag: discography

Maida Vale

Posted on by darren

On the 23rd of August 2000, Hefner played a very special show from BBC’s Maida Vale studios to an invited audience for the John Peel show. This was the highlight of the relationship between the band and the greatly revered DJ, which had seen five Peel sessions and four live concerts broadcast on his Radio 1 show.

The concert on this CD features an 8 piece version of the band, including a brass section, pedal steels, ukuleles and violin alongside their own guitars bass and drums. It also features several contributions from Amelia Fletcher, (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Wedding Present, Marine Research). The songs have been newly remixed from the original master tapes, and the CD features photos from the night as well as sleeve notes from Darren Hayman.

The CD captures an exceptional performance of many songs rarely played live during Hefner’s short career.

Buy Maida Vale on CD


or buy download from Bandcamp for £4.99

 

Catfight

Posted on by darren

Released August 2006

For such a short career, Hefner were incredibly prolific, but this release proves we only knew half the story. 43 unreleased songs are collected here on two CDs. The songs are sequenced in reverse order, starting with the final Hefner recording session and going right back to 1994 with Darren’s earliest songs, 3 years before Breaking God’s Heart. The CDs also come with extensive new sleeve notes from Darren himself and previously unseen photographs.

Buy Catfight on double CD


Or buy the download from Bandcamp for £7.99.

The Best of Hefner

Posted on by darren

Originally released 27th March 2006 on Fortune and Glory.

A collection of singles, live favourites, b-sides and rarities, The Best of Hefner re-releases twenty of the band’s most-loved songs.

Review from http://drownedinsound.com/releases/7279/reviews/726346-
BY BEN MARWOOD

In an ideal musical world where the cream does actually rise to the top and Oasis only had two albums, I would not have to explain who Hefner were. You’d already know, because the indie-rock quartet would be on every Q list ever and on MTV2 at every opportunity; there would be no escape. But life isn’t fair kids, life’s a bitch and it hates you. Life will break your heart.

That was the point of Hefner, a band renowned for the songwriting of Darren Hayman, for whom lyrical heartbreak lied around every corner. Whilst the ‘cool’ bands wrote songs about the lack of intelligence in the NYPD, Hayman wrote about the Trojan War and the future death of Margaret Thatcher as well as the countless lost loves. The songs of Hefner, whether it was their ultra-lo-fi first recordings or the polished electronica which proved to be their curtain call, were so tactile that they almost reached out and touched you and so honest, so laced with frustration that on occasion it made Belle & Sebastian look bland. “Everytime you cry, it gives me little heart attacks”, sobs Hayman on ‘Good Fruit’ with an observation so tiny that most writers would never consider it for a lyric. Coupled with a no-nonsense attitude towards intimacy (“you should be lying on your back with a glow in your heart” comes the sleazy observation in ‘Pull Yourself Together’), this is what earmarked Hefner, for me at least, as something special.

The Best Of Hefner, then, is a cross-section of the six years that Hefner were properly active, featuring both ultra-rare songs, like ‘A Better Friend and the original version of ‘Christian Girls, and their ‘hits’ ‘I Took Her Love For Granted’, ‘Good Fruit’ et al. Unlike most Best Ofs, this is not just a tired singles compilation (although all singles are present and correct), the fan favourites are on here also from the masturbatory tale of b-side ‘Hello Kitten’ to the Conservative-baiting playground singalong that is ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’. True to the entire back catalogue, even two tracks from less popular final album Dead Media (‘When Angels Play Their Drum Machines’ and ‘Home’) are included, and when their electronica sounds are put back to back with the guitar-based portion of the back catalogue new life is breathed into them – they work much better intermingled here than they ever did mixing with their own kind.

If there is one criticism that could be made, it is that with a slew of excellent b-sides behind them only ‘Hello Kitten’ made the final cut, but it should go without saying that fans of Hefner will want to own this CD for the first few rare tracks, if not just to complete the collection. For anyone who missed out and is intrigued then I implore you: if you’ve ever been heartbroken, if you’ve ever looked at the coquette from down the road and thought “well, maybe..”, if you like your music honest, slightly filthy and faintly twee then do yourself a favour, make this top of your list.

Buy The Best of Hefner on CD


Buy the ‘Best Of’ downloads from Bandcamp for £5.99

Table for One

Posted on by darren

Released 6th March 2006
Bruised and bloodied, former Hefner frontman Darren Hayman crawls out from his car wreck life armed with only his battle-scarred telecaster and ukulele for protection. Darren’s been given a right kicking by the music biz, but he’s not down – in fact, he’s smiling ear to ear. In the two years since his last album with The French, Darren has worked for the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals and Battersea Dogs Home, gotten married, formed a bluegrass band, put on a lot of weight and studied an Art PGCE at Goldsmiths College. “If I don’t work I go nuts, I wasted 6 months addicted to internet chess,” says Hayman. This album is his best so far; until the next one. Real drums and guitars mark a return to the indie folk style of Hefner, but better. “Every time I write a song, it’s better than the last one,” continues Hayman. “I thought it was that way for everyone?”

The songs on Hayman’s debut solo album, Table for One, concern crumbling cafes, dog charities, a broken hearted Doug Yule, retiring school teachers, and air hostesses plummeting to their deaths. It’s not fun in Darren’s head, but it IS fun to watch and listen from a distance.

Darren Hayman, Table for One (Track & Field) David Peschek The Guardian, Friday 10 March 2006 5/5

Late of Hefner, Darren Hayman is London’s laureate of sexual dysfunction, discomfort, and dog-eared under-achievement. After Hefner’s demise, he made a record of sublime, bittersweet electropop under the moniker the French, but found himself prevented from further recording by contractual wrangles.

A free man at last, he is moving into warmer, more organic territory on Table For One. Hayman’s world might seem grimly parochial but prickly moments of recognition lift every song into something sweetly noble and moving. Best is the almost unbearably poignant Doug Yule’s Velvet Underground, which restores a little dignity to the band’s brutally unloved final phase, “with none of the original members ‘cos Maureen thought she’d take a rest”.

As the music wheezes, rattles and chimes around him, you realise he’s the match of Ray Davies, or any of the quintessentially English masters.

Buy Table for One on CD


Or buy the Download here from Bandcamp

The Stereo Morphonium

Posted on by darren

Originally released 22nd August, 2005.

Darren describes the Stereo Morphonium, a spin-off band formed with his friend Joel Neumatic, as ‘weird freak-out synth rock with no vocals’. They played ‘two fairly hilarious shows’, and their EP, consisting of the tracks ‘The Stereo Morphonium’, ‘Pigeon Box’, ‘Gemini 6’, ‘Plight of the Manhattanite’, and ‘Ozmodiar’, remains available to buy.

Buy The Stereo Morphonium on CD


 

 

Local Information

Posted on by darren

Originally released August 11th 2003

Following their last album with Hefner, Darren Hayman and John Morrison made an entirely electronic album, Local Information, under the name ‘The French’. Now considered by Darren to be his favourite album, the record was featured as a ‘Buried Treasure’ in the September 2009 issue of MOJO magazine.

Vive the French!

By JIM LEDBETTER  Time Magazine Sunday, Aug. 10, 2003

In October 2000, I found myself drinking champagne in an east London bar with Molly Ringwald. I’d had the usual schoolboy interest in the coltish American actress ever since The Breakfast Club; she was visiting town and a mutual friend suggested we meet. Molly wore fishnet stockings and her hair was short and brown. (Was it ever truly red?) We talked about a sitcom she was developing, and about the U.S. presidential race. When the bottle was empty she went off to have dinner at the Ivy with Channel 4 star Graham Norton; I got in a taxi, exhilarated but slightly glum, and went home. A copy of We Love the City by Hefner— a London-based trio somewhere between folk and punk — had just arrived from Amazon. I hit the play button and heard the first line of the first song: “This is London/ Not Antarctica/ So why don’t the tubes run all night?/ You are my girlfriend/ Not Molly Ringwald/ So why won’t you stay here tonight?”

After my freak-out subsided, I realized it was a perfect Hefner moment. Through five albums starting in the late ’90s, the band constantly blurred the lines between life and art — with songs about love-wrecked, angry misfits living in rented outer London bedsits — and produced some of the funniest, most tender independent music to come out of the U.K. in a decade. Hefner appears to have evaporated, but the creative force behind it, Darren Hayman, has formed the French, which this week releases its debut Local Information, a winning collection of story songs from the miserabilist and his electric keyboards.

“I don’t like to say we split up,” Hayman says of Hefner. “It’s just that four or five albums is enough, unless there’s something really new to do.” Hefner’s drummer and guitarist are pursuing solo projects, while Hayman and bassist John Morrison are the French. Why call a band the French? Hayman, who grew up in Essex, explains that due to the antipathy his countrymen have for their neighbors across the Channel, “it’s a kind of litmus test of my audience.”

His audience — somewhere between big cult and the bottom of the pop charts — will be relieved to discover that the essence of Hefner is still there: the realization that the stupid experiences we all have can be the building blocks of art. Hayman’s is the music of false starts and dead ends; like Woody Allen and Philip Roth, he turns unvarnished neurosis into art.

The French sounds much as Hefner did on their last album, Dead Media: sparse organ arrangements that almost qualify as melodies, with occasional blips and bleeps added. Hayman says he had to create a new band to accommodate his increasing push toward electronica: “I don’t think of eclectic as a good thing in a band, and to record the songs the way I want them to sound as a Hefner record would be misleading people.”

The biggest change is that Hayman — at least in his songs — has gone straight and domestic. Not that surprising: Hayman is now 32 and looking for property in Barcelona. In The Pines, a kind of love song between white separatists in the American South, the man who wrote the boozy anthem The Hymn for the Alcohol now proclaims: “I don’t do drink or take no drugs/ But Christ she’s hit the bottle/ Like there’s no tomorrow.” And while Hefner ballads usually chronicled a brief infatuation, many French songs are about something like commitment. In The Stars, the Moon, the Sun and the Clouds, the singer chastises his girlfriend’s scholarly squalor: “It’s all very well/ Learning poetry by heart/ But it doesn’t mean/ We have to live like poets.”

As with so much electronica, there’s a soulless quality to this record, not helped by Hayman’s insistence on recording with a drum machine. His DIY aesthetic has its own appeal, but without guitars to ground it, his plaintive voice risks floating off into nasal helium. But he can still make me laugh. The best track is Gabriel in the Airport, a wicked attack on the pretensions of Peter Gabriel: “And the British Airways girls they sigh/ Saying ‘There goes that Phil Collins guy.'”

Listening to the French is much like listening to the indie-rock god Stephen Malkmus’ solo work; it gives you a wistful yearning that his great band Pavement was still recording, but you’re grateful for anything you can still get. As for Molly, the last time I saw her was in the New York Post, pregnant. There’s a song in there somewhere.

 

Buy Local Information by The French on CD


Or buy the downloads from Bandcamp

Dead Media

Posted on by darren

Released 24th September 2001; 2 CD version released 4th July 2011.

In their relatively brief lifetime, between 1996 and 2002, Hefner enjoyed an incredibly productive four-album, multi-EP career. Their beautiful, concise, intelligent songs earned a fiercely loyal, cult audience and the long-term support of legendary DJ John Peel, for whom they recorded innumerable sessions.

Originally released in 2001, their final album, Dead Media , found Hefner reaching out and taking risks. Keen to break free of their indie-folk roots, they cocooned themselves in a home studio with
broken analogue synthesizers, antique drum machines and battery-powered amplifiers. The band’s naivety and guile produced some curiously engaging music, with frontman Darren Hayman’s precise, economic, poetic dissections of quotidian romance draped over awkward, fuzzy beats: something like Cat Stevens covering Warm Leatherette.

Dead Media caused confusion at the time and ultimately lead to the band’s break up. However, songs like ‘Junk’, ‘The Nights Are Long’ and ‘When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines’ are among Hayman’s most adult and affecting essays and stand out among the finest of Hefner’s achievements.

This two-disk reissue tells the full story of Hefner’s valedictory folly, with a hefty 20 extra tracks including the complete ‘Hefner Brain’ EP, B-sides, live tracks, unreleased songs and an exclusive, unreleased remix by electronic music pioneer Daniel Miller (composer of the aforementioned ‘Warm Leatherette’).

Review from http://soundsxp.com/

Article written by Paul M – Jun 12, 2011

Dead Media first appeared in 2001, becoming Hefner’s fifth album in a very prolific four years. I don’t remember any Dylan-esq yells of “Judas” from the back of the auditorium at the time but it certainly wasn’t universally popular with the anoraked teddy-clutching fraternity. An experimental departure from their previous lo-fi produced guitar efforts, it proved to have something of a divisive effect on their fan-base. The cause of the consternation was the fact that the strings of old had been replaced by analogue synths so while lyrically it was as intelligent and witty as ever, musically it was less indie guitar folk and more a midpoint between Joe Meek cheesy electro-pop and early Depeche Mode casio futurism.I don’t think Darren Hayman ever considered this anything more than an enjoyable diversion, one in which another Hefner member, Jack Hayter had more of an input than previously, but the ‘backlash’ killed the band. So was the mixed reception justified? Well, we at SoundsXP loved it at the time, voting it album of the year in our annual writers’ poll (and this in a year that featured the Strokes debut) and listening to it ten years on, I still do. It all remains clearly Hefner and the wonderful material Hayman has produced since suggests he enjoys slapping his pinkies onto the ivories occasionally even now. When the Angels Play Their Drum Machines is brilliant; its rumbling synth backdrop accompanied by cute overlaying bleepy melodies and one of Hayman’s trademark tales of love and lust. Storytelling is of course one of his greatest talents and Alan Bean is Hayman at his best, recounting the tale of the forgotten fourth man on the moon. Another single, Trouble Kid, is glampop but with electronic samples. However it is not all drum machines and keyboard wizardry, there’s the odd pedal steel thrown in to really prod a finger into the ear of the narrower minded listener, with The King of Summer another highlight, with its languid country barroom blues.If none of this has convinced you that you need to splash your cash then maybe the extras will, with the original fifteen track LP boosted by a swathe of additions; old b-sides, radio session tracks, remixes and the Hefner Brain EP. In other words an even more stunning 35 tracks over two discs.

Buy Dead Media on 2CD


We also have limited stock of the original Dead Media CD release


Or buy the download from Bandcamp

 

 

 

 

 

We Love the City

Posted on by darren

Released 16th October 2000; 2CD version re-released 28th September 2009

We Love the City was Hefner’s commercial and creative peak.

Having cleared a large backlog of songs on the band’s first two albums and various B-sides, for their third Darren Hayman wrote a new set of songs, loosely themed around love in the capital city. We Love The City eschews the band’s former broken indie-folk sound in favour of a bouncy, urban, blue-eyed soul, and an expanded line up including Hammond organs, Wurlitzer pianos and brass sections.

Songs like ‘Greedy Ugly People’, ‘Good Fruit’, ‘Painting and Kissing’ and ‘The Day that Thatcher Dies’ are typical examples of the direct, infectious, intelligent style that endeared Hefner to so many. The album’s narrative is conceptual and played out by a retinue of vividly drawn characters, but at heart this is Hayman’s most personal and focussed work.

Always championed by John Peel, promotion for this album culminated in a full, real time performance show session, broadcast live from BBC Maida Vale (now available elsewhere as the album Maida Vale).

This two-disc set expands the original album to a mighty 39 songs, including all of the relevant B-sides, substantially different alternate versions and surprising remixes from Electric Sound of Joy, Piano Magic and The Wisdom of Harry.

Review of We Love the City from http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/

BY SIMON TYERS, 8 OCTOBER 2009


Hefner‘s posthumous merchandise bears the legend “Britain’s biggest small band”. With 2000′s third proper album We Love The City they nearly became Britain’s smallest big band, cracking the top 50 with the preceding single ‘Good Fruit’ and playing a good amount of big festivals. Up to this point they were self-made men who sounded like they recorded ad hoc in bedrooms after listening to too many Jonathan Richman and country records and never got round to understanding women. Darren Hayman claims in the liner notes that this is his favourite of their four albums, the first to be written towards a whole album rather than a selection of tracks plucked from his back catalogue. He’s also said it was influenced by Dexys Midnight Runners’ Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, a grand statement to make but, if it doesn’t come up to Kevin Rowland’s famously exacting standards of hard-hitting soul, the occasionally expanded musical palette tacked onto the reliably ramshackle basic indie trio template (although Hefner were a quartet by now) and raw emotional core give it a blue-eyed sheen that demonstrated why they earned themselves such a cult following bereft of major press or radio support.

Claimed at the time as a concept album about London, it’s more apparent that the lyrical theme is more of people being in love in and against the city, its boho aspirations and commuter daily grind. “This is sixth form poetry, not Keats or Yeats” Hayman cautions on the title track, but in its field his character studies and urbanity appreciations touch a nerve, albeit not the same one suggested in ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’. While nobody would ever claim he possesses one of the great voices, it carries here as an emotional, yearning tool that benefits the likes of the querulous, Violent Femmes-ish ‘Don’t Go’ and ‘The Greedy Ugly People’, unyielding in its triumphant coda “love don’t stop no wars, don’t stop no cancer, it stops my heart”. The title track frames his appreciation of the city “that never loves us back” in a frame that specifies it’s only because “because it lets us down”, thinking big and bringing people together despite itself. It’s actually a much more solid, consistent album than memory recalls. Shining anew the best is ‘The Cure For Evil’, a piano led love song that implicitly fears mutual adoration might fall apart through either neglect or overdoing it, featuring one of six guest vocal appearances from Amelia Fletcher (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, Tender Trap) and a triumphant brass coda.

Hayman’s archive-clearing exercises on these reissues has been all encompassing, and this one gives us an extra 27 – count ‘em – tracks. The B-sides (sadly not including their cover of David Soul’s
‘Don’t Give Up On Us’) essentially sound like lesser versions of the sound of this and the previous album, bar the odd and not un-proficient analogue pulsing of ‘Blackhorse Road’, a sound Hefner would take up fuller on next album Dead Media with, shall we say, mixed results. The demos just sound like less produced versions of the same tracks as on the album. Boxing Hefner, the odds’n’sods compilation that preceded this record, offcuts ‘Lee Remick’ (not the Go-Betweens song of the same name, although it sounds a bit like them), about family feuding and “all my pretty friends who just grew up and failed”, and ‘The Hymn For The Things We Didn’t Do’ are worth seeking out, while the remixes give up on remodelling much of the songs and go their own direction. The Electric Sound Of Joy, big Lamacq tips at the time, offer a brass-motorik crossover, Baxendale turn ‘The Greedy Ugly People’ into warped spangly electro and the usually dreampop collective Piano Magic literally cut up ‘Good Fruit’ into something often not far from the Ibizan sound, if you can imagine such a thing.

“The city has no faith if we’ve no faith in the city/But this is my home, this is where I want to be” Hayman asserts amid the whirling organs and brass flourishes of ‘The Greater London Radio’. It’s an ambitious statement that dovetails with the great leap forward into lusher arrangement and production territory that, if only for this album, Hayman and Hefner made. Strip away all that, though, and at its heart are tremendously romantic, intelligent songs that demonstrate how, from a bare bones guitar-bass-drums indie outset and beyond all stylistic ideals, Hefner found their own unique voice.

Buy We Love the City on 2CD

Sold out

Or buy the downloads from Bandcamp

 

Boxing Hefner

Posted on by darren
Boxing Hefner

A compilation of a-sides, b-sides, rarities and unreleased songs, Boxing Hefner features three Steve Lamacq BBC sessions and one Peel session, alongside several previously-released songs, and according to Darren contains more of the band’s live favourites than any other Hefner release.

 

Review of Boxing Hefner from pennyblackmusic.co.uk

BY SCOTT MILLER

As far as I can tell, Hefner has a pretty healthy buzz in the UK, which is why I feel a little self-conscious writing this review. See, I live in the US, and, while I’m sure there are pockets of folks here who love Hefner, they’re not what you’d call a household name. In other words, before I got this record a few weeks ago, I had never heard them. So please cut me the same type of slack that you would a kid from Greenland who was gushing about how great this new band Belle & Sebastian are in a review of ‘Boy With the Arab Strap’.

That said, on to the gushing…

I got Boxing Hefner in the mail with a bunch of other stuff that I was unfamiliar with. I was going through one of those periods where it suddenly strikes me that there must be tons of great new bands that I’m missing out on- so I ordered a bunch of stuff I’d never heard & waited patiently for the enlightening shipment to arrive.

There’s a pretty great alley in Sacramento (where I live) that goes really far back & dead ends in to a fence. No cars ever drive up it & it’s covered by trees & not all messed up by broken bottles or anything. Not to mention some gracious woman (who I’d thank profusely if I wasn’t fairly certain that she’d freak out if she knew kids were hanging out behind her house) has stored a bunch of lawn chairs in the alley, so we’ve made it our personal little hangout where we can listen to records (on the coveted battery operated record player), shoot the breeze, and mysteriously, some beer or wine usually appears on the scene. I was by myself the day that the pregnant package arrived (is there anything worse than waiting for something exciting in the mail?) so I took it to the alley & released a bit of stale UK air & some 15 records.

I kind of circled them at first like you do with the presents at Christmas time – trying to formulate some strategy that will make for an inspiring order of events – evenly spacing out the socks, the gift certificates, & the stuff you REALLY hope you got. And of course, you want to save the best one for last. I’d say I did
pretty good – there were some pretty great singles in there (and, yes, a few pairs of socks) & I was feeling pretty good about the future of pop music. Pretty good is all I expect most of the time so when I lazily grabbed the last record, I was already pretty full (not to mention, the sun was going down). But this record, it turns out, was no last piece of ham at Christmas dinner that one mindlessly eats, despite being stuffed, solely, I suppose, because it’s the last piece (& it looks so lonely.) No, this record with the silly cartoon on the cover, this record by a band whose name totally rubbed me the wrong way, this “Boxing Hefner” turned out to be the proverbial last, greatest present under the tree. 3 weeks later, it’s so ingrained in my brain (in fact, I’m listening to it right now) that it’s hard to think back to my first impressions, but I’ll try.

“Christian Girls” was first & I liked it OK but there was still that initial mistrust of something new going on. “Lee Remick” was second. And third. And fourth. I don’t know exactly what Lee Remick did to deserve to have 2 of the greatest pop songs in the world written about her, but it must have been pretty great (or maybe it’s just those eyes). Anyway, this isn’t the Go Betweens song, but a gorgeous ballad that seems to me to be about growing up & realising that things aren’t so perfect, but still revisiting (thus somehow retaining) your innocence via the things you obsessed on when young. The things that became symbols of God knows what but Christ they were important- in this case, Lee Remick. I suppose that lots of bands can write about bittersweet things like that, but Hefner make their songs SOUND like what they’re about. Do you know what I mean? It’s more than ‘Sad Song = Slow’; Happy Song = Fast’. The lyrics equate with the music so perfectly that you get the feeling that the songs were written, if not at the same moment, at least on the same day as the things they sing about happened. They’re neither lo-fi nor overly polished – simply naked.

The obvious focal point of the group is Darren Hayman, who sings, plays guitar & writes the songs. His voice, though not what you could call good in any traditional sense, is absolutely perfect, no essential, for the songs.

Ahh..the songs. They’re little epics sung with so much damn passion – a passion that matches blow for blow the highly personal (& sometimes uncomfortably specific) lyrics. It also makes for a completely obsessive experience, and when you’re obsessed, you don’t always think too clearly.

Take this review – I’m fairly sure the point I started to make an hour ago about “Lee Remick” & how I listened to it over & over has digressed- or maybe blurred is a better word.

Yes, my point has most definitely gotten very blurry.

I’m no longer in the alley, that’s for sure. I was briefly at the record store the next day buying their second record ‘The Fidelity Wars’ (another story and a GREAT album!) but I’m not there anymore either.

I think maybe it’s Monday morning now (I got Boxing Hefner on Friday) & I’m crawling in to work. Everyone’s asking me what I did this weekend & I’m giving them answers that are best suited for their individual personalities. I didn’t tell anyone what I REALLY did though – it was just too hard to explain. What I REALLY did was listen to Hefner. First thing in the morning, walking around, at a show, going to bed….that’s what I did.

I was watching Raging Bull on Sunday evening and I was marvelling at how for each amazing, scene-stealing performance that DeNiro gave, Scorsese matched it blow for blow with the most awesome camera angle and/or visual. Then I thought about how Darren Hayman does that with his music & lyrics. Obsessed, I said.

But I realise that I need to make some sense now since this is supposed to be a review – but really there’s no way to properly describe how music sounds, and comparisons are usually lazy. Case in point: from what I’ve read, these are the comparisons Hefner most often get in the press. Belle & Sebastian, Violent Femmes & Jonathan Richman.

First, everything gets compared to Belle & Sebastian these days, but I’ve never heard any bands that sound like what I like about B&S. The only thing I can think of is that most bands have a hard time putting out a completely interesting album & both Hefner & B&S have done that. But where Belle & Sebastian might insert a perfect trumpet solo, Hefner are more likely to throw in a raggedly inspired Trombone bit.

The Violent Femmes makes some sense. Both have simple, live sounding instrumentation that often leans to the acoustic side of things – but while the Violent Femmes helped define underground music in the 80s (at least in the US), Hefner are very much English & I also feel that what they’re doing is most definitely not “80’s”. I actually threw on the first Violent Femmes record recently to see what I felt about the comparison, and I’d say that ‘Good Feeling’ comes close to the simplistic beauty that Hefner are capable of.

Jonathan Richman is accurate in the sense that both share a refreshing directness & honesty, a sort of timeless quality & each have imperfectly perfect voices, but let’s face it, nobody is like Jonathan Richman, Hefner included. (They do, however, do a great version of J. Richman’s “To Hide A Little Thought” on Boxing Hefner that’s every bit as good as the original, and, as only great bands can do, they make it theirs.)

I could go on and on and I’d still just be talking in circles, so I’ll wrap this up by stating the obvious: I love Hefner. I think you will too. Boxing Hefner is a great record & a perfect introduction to the band. Don’t be deterred by the fact that this is technically an odds & ends record (2 songs are unreleased, 5 are unreleased [and fairly different] versions of older songs & 5 have appeared on record before). It’s every bit as good as the other two. I trust that everyone reading this has been totally wrapped up in a band/record before & I hope that if you get anything from this review, it’s that sense of being so in to something that you want to say 100 things at once & you’re never sure if you’ve said any of it. Thanks for reading.