- Artists:
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Hefner’s influence can still be seen today. Darren Hayman’s strained vocals, full of pleading art-school sincerity, find their present incarnation in The Wave Pictures (who also occasionally play as Hayman’s backing band), warbling and teary as they are. Hayman’s lyrics, verging on the graphic at times, could be seen to be echoed in Emmy the Great’s similar propensity for feminine anatomical specificity – if on The Fidelity Wars's ‘May God Protect Your Home’ we hear about “the soft warm place” “between those thighs”, so in Emmy’s songs we’re told about “puddles on the floor” in illicit back-garden encounters. Thus Hefner’s records are now being repackaged and re-released; there’s no doubt that the band paved the way for a host of acts to tow the ‘urban-folk’ line, a way of taking indie-rock's intimacy and pushing it further, to its extremes – songs that aren’t just about love but about sex, with the emphasis on the x, a word preferably slurred with a bottle of red wine clasped sweatily in one scrawny hand, the other clutching a Lucky Strike and a Polaroid camera.
That may be an exaggerated image (in fact, that is an exaggerated image), but it’s still the impression that The Fidelity Wars (originally released in 1999) creates of Hayman. It’s ostensibly an album about break-ups, each song dealing with a different side of separation. Yet the central figure throughout is not the girls, but Hayman himself – those cloying vocals, so aware of their tenuous grip on melody, ensure that it’s always him that’s centre stage. The problem is that I like Emmy the Great and The Wave Pictures, both of whom balance graphic detail with a sense of humility and humour; after listening to The Fidelity Wars I came out really disliking Hayman.
It’s the needy voice, one that crosses the line from frail into clinging. The image that he creates of himself here is undoubtedly separate from his real-life incarnation, yet still, rather than seeming lovably fragile, his character emerges as needy in the worst art-school tradition. “I don’t want to be alone,” he pleads on ‘I Love Only You’ – coming as it does on the last line of the album it’s a suitable way to close a record in which the final impression of Hayman is of someone, dare I say it, faintly pathetic. Disconcertingly, this stringy persona approaches women as aesthetic concepts, rather than real people, ‘habits’ that he struggles to quit, like drinking or smoking.
Throughout we hear the lyrics list body parts as if Hayman is trying to reconstruct and appropriate these lost women bit by bit: on ‘I Took Her Love For Granted’ it’s “her lips”, on ‘The Weight of the Stars’ it’s “her pale skinny legs”; indeed, on the latter one verse even has a sort of anatomical list (“the freckles upon her back, the grey hairs… the lines upon her hands”). Hayman’s memory of his muse is less a personal portrait and more a diagram, the female body a sort of unknowable map that these songs try to chart and even surreptitiously conquer. We hear this explicitly in the aforementioned ‘May God Protect Your Home’, Hayman recounting how his “hand starts to move down your stomach and in between those thighs, to a soft warm place I call home”. Hayman’s own obsessive fascination with sex and the female body overshadows the moments where the women do speak back – the girl who writes “‘Porn is women hatred’” on his coat, for example.
The apotheosis is ‘Fat Kelly’s Teeth’, where we hear how a night of drinking lead Hayman to spend the night with, gasp, a fat girl. “What was I thinking of?” he asks us; “when I went home with her, she had sympathy, she had cigarettes, now they've all disappeared”. It’s hard to have empathy with the essentially superficial portrait that Hayman paints of himself; of course, this might be the point, but that doesn’t change the record’s slight shallowness – beneath all the art-school credentials, there’s still the same dry fetishisation of fags, booze and booty that runs through all indie-rock. There are undoubtedly some good moments, ‘The Hymn For The Cigarettes’ the least cloying of all the tracks on the record. Yet even here the same strange, sallow strain runs deep: “I love to see the girls smoke in my bed”. That’s just the point (one that the twenty-nine (!) bonus tracks re-emphasise) – Hayman loves the smoking, not the girls. It’s an important distinction.
- Hefner - We Love the City (reissue)
- Emmy meets Darren Hayman (Hefner)
- When Darren met Dave: indie legends head to head
- Hefner - The Fidelity Wars - special edition
- Hefner - The Fidelity Wars - special edition
- Mixtape #9: Gareth Los Campesinos!
- Hefner - Breaking God's Heart - Expanded Edition
- Hefner - Breaking God's Heart - Expanded Edition
Hefner
Hefner - The Best Of Hefner
Hefner - Dead Media
Hefner - Catfight
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I've had this since came out and 5/10 just doesn;t wash with me.
Agreed sometimes his voice can be a bit grating but it's worth 5/10 alone just for the sweet 'Don't flake out on me', the brass fade out to 'We were meant to be' 'I thought that you were meant for ME, that you'd SEE, that WE WERE MEANT TO BE UH oh oh, Oooh...' the dispairing guitar intro of 'Fat Kellys teeth' and 'Oh when she lies with me, will she forget I'm ugly, will she pretend I'm pretty oh I've lived a lie...'
So basically all universal stuff that I'd never quite heard before apart from a bit similar to Violent Femmes so I'll always like it
No way 5/10
i guess you could mark it down
for the extras, but without them its at least a 7.
Wait a minute...
This goddamn review doesn't even mention the extras! What's the point of reviewing it if just reviewing the standard album?
erm, to review the standard album, obvs
the die-hard fans who want all the extras on one disc will buy it anyway. everyone else will be mostly interested in the standard album
wow
that's spectacularly shortsighted and humourless interpretation of this record. do you really not get any sense of self awareness from hayman's lyrics? does the very fact that he's channeling this into a pop record not tell you something?
way to miss the point, not to mention all the fun that it's part of hyperbole : )
More fundamentally
what's the point of reviewing it if you fundamentally don't like Hefner?
I mean I always go on this rant and no-one agrees me but a review is clearly a guide for people who'd theoretically like the album if it was good as to whether it was well-done or not. There's generally little point in reading a review from someone who wouldn't like it if it was well-done 'cos that tells the people who would like it if it was well-done nothing.
I'm not suggesting there should be some sycophantic "I Love Hefner, aren't they wonderful?" review but it seems to strange to get someone to review it who just doesn't really like the band.
Exactly.
As a review of a re-issue, do you think that you ought to have touched upon the bonus tracks a teensy bit more? A lot of those interested in the release are more than aware of what the original album sounds like (and that your 5/10 rating is clearly wrong, as the previous postee points out, for 'Don't Flake Out On Me' alone), but not the b-sides and outtakes that Darren included. Otherwise, you could've written that review in 1999 (and still been wrong)...
Seeing as everyone is laying into this review...
"Thus Hefner’s record’s" needs to lose an apostrophe.
</pedant>
Also, FW is super great.
I’ve always loved this album.
Yeah Hayman doesn’t come off as compassionate, but why does he need to be? These songs always stuck me as the confessions of a self-aware melodramatic. There’s an element of parody and humour that runs though out the record, a knowing nod that he’s whining. If you have a relatively middle class lifestyle, free of serious responsibility your preoccupations do become somewhat self centred and hedonistic, and I think that’s reflected in Hefner’s songs.
I do prefer Breaking God’s Heart though
Too Pure?
I think that might be wrong... probably the last place Darren would want to see his music.
A very good album imho.
It'd be in my top 20 albums, maybe top 10
I love hefner though. The odd thing is that the article reads like some kind of attack on the record's masculinity when I know more Hefner fans who are female than male. I notice some slightly out of context quoting to back up the argument too. To me Darren's lyrics always had a kind of knowing irony to them which ran opposite to:
''the same dry fetishisation of fags, booze and booty that runs through all indie-rock''
And do not mention the ''Hymn For The Alcohol'' as a highpoint is criminal. Considering some of the records which score 9's on this site the album deserves at least 15.
I don't actually own any hefner B-sides aside from those on Boxing Hefner, any ideas on which are the best ones to pick up/download legally?
I suspect you're right...
But I think it's on Cargo.
I think where me and the guy who wrote the review differ
is that what I love about Hefner is Darren Hayman's lyrical openness and his preparedness to sing honestly and humorously about his flaws in a way that I've never really heard any artist do. No pretension, no self-editing to appear a cooler or better person than he is, just genuine honesty about his emotions that few other songwriters are able to do.
He's actually prepared to risk sounding dislikable or shallow or self-centred in order to tell the truth about who he is as a person and experiences the world. Frankly he may have an unhealthy attitude to sex and women but hell of a lot of men do to one extent or other and most wouldn't be prepared to admit it in that way...
The point someone makes aboves true also - that Hefner do tend to attract a larger female fanbase than many indie bands, possibly for the exact reason of the flawed honestly of it all.
.
I love this band, I love this album. This review is just wrong!
Exactly
I always feel as though the first 2 Hefner records are all about how he knows he's messing things up, he knows it's him whose attitudes are wrong but he doesn't really understand how to change this. It is a very honest album with a great deal of empathy for its female characters and a great deal of confusion, self pity and at times almost self loathing on the part of its male protagonist. At no point does this record try to be cool or knowing and there just aren't enough records out their like it.
Anyway this record was the soundtrack to the sad, self interested and myopic teen I was and I love it to pieces. My completist nature means that as soon as I get paid I'm buying this even though I own nearly everything he's ever released.
What a bad review
"He's all whiney and stuff"
Thanks!
terrible review
I've owned (and loved) this album for the last ten years yet this review gives me no indication whatsoever whether its worth purchasing this edition or not.
5/10 is just plain wrong. Why get some one who clearly doesn't 'get' Hefner to write the review?
And if your looking examples of Hefner's legacy living on in music today (which the first paragraph tries to)Surely Art Brut are a better known example?. Eddie Argos cites Darren Hayman as a huge influence.
spot on
I've had this cd for ten solid years now, and I never really liked it. Haymann's voice is irritating, some songs are OK (Took Her Love exp) but most of them are average, and the lyrics make me cringe instantly.
Hefner were very overrated, in my opinion.
.
What a rubbish review.
Oh, snap
"Hayman doesn’t come off as compassionate, but why does he need to be?"
Afuckingmen to that, one of the many things that made Hefner brilliant
As does
Gareth from Los Campesinos!
But The Wave Pictures are fairly well known and that comparison works.
I don't have any real beef with the writing of the review [other than him ignoring all the bonus tracks], I just think the record in question is pretty excellent
But then, I love all Hefner lots so what do I know?
5 / 10?
shurely shome mishtake.
this album is 10 out of 10.
Darren at his very best.
.
hefner are a band that connect with me in a way i have never felt towards any other art, and this is my favourite album. the way you just smugly reduced the fidelity wars is one of the ugliest things i have ever read.
also
stop banging on about the fact he went to art school you resentfull bellend
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