Fractionals

Hefner are an interesting band, and they've gotten a lot more interesting in the last few years. Originally they played the sort of bedsit indie rock that critics and a small fanbase find intoxicating and most other just find annoying, but recently Darren Hayman has revealed a deep love for vintage synthesizers and a willingness to use them. There are two caveats to this, two preemptive responses to possibly unspoken questions: the first is that Dead Media, the album where Hefner first employed their new style, came out back in 2001, and all indications from their making-of dairy indicates that this was no attempt to hitch onto the nascent 'electroclash' bandwagon, and indeed their sound has never really gone in the same direction as, say, Ladytron. The second caveat is to reassure the timid reader that Hayman has not simply bolted some squeaks and squelches to the existing indie chassis; instead Hefner have taken the more interesting turn of putting out full-fledged tracks of what might bear a slight resemblence to synth-pop, where their more traditional output recently has tended more towards the quiet, folkier end of the pre-existing Hefner spectrum.

'Dark Hearted Discos' is an example of the former from 2002's The Hefner Brain EP, and it is remarkable for two reasons. The first is the lyrics, marking a new turn, or maybe the completion of that turn, in Hayman's writing. The other is simply that it is one of the best songs Hefner has produced out of a fertile field, with a chorus that is nigh-irresistable.

The lyrics are phrased basically as advice from Hayman to a younger female (he calls her 'sweetheart', but this being Hayman, that may not mean anything). I once characterised earlier Hefner as being a series of songs in which Hayman is perpetually losing the girl, has lost the girl, or is about to cheat on the girl, but that has gradually faded with age. Early Hefner was touched with adolescence in much the same way as the Buzzcocks, last week's subjects, were. This is not a criticism - much of rock is about adolescent urges or feelings in some sense, and harnessing it creatively can be a powerful thing. In early Hefner the love songs and the lost-love songs are exaggerated with hormones and longing (witness a song as early as 'The Librarian': Her tears have not truly been dried 'til her tears have been dried on his tattered shirt sleeves/Her body has not truly been stripped 'til her clothes have been ripped by his nail bitten fingers; as with most of our adolescent proclamations its patently false and a bit dodgy when written down, but sung it's glorious). One of the functions of rock music, if not the only one, is to glorify that ackwardness, that feeling of separation and specialness, that comes in teenhood.*

It is interesting to note that a sentiment that has recurred twice in recent Hefner songs is that 'life without you is half a life'. while codependancy in music lyrics is far too prevalent, and generally odious, here it is interesting to note that in the past Hayman would be too busy either treating her horribly or projecting his own desires onto her to truly assess what losing her would be like. His realisation that life is, in fact, better with her, and that alone is enough to be happy, mirrors Rob Gordon's progression through "High Fidelity". Neither Gordon nor Hayman (nor any of us, of course), ever fully succeeds, but at least they try.

'Dark Hearted Discos' marks one of the first times that Hayman explicitly puts himself into the role of the older, wiser person. The song starts off with In the 1980s we had dark hearted discos/With dark hearted disco queens. Hayman has often dealt with remembrances of the past, but he has never had any truck with something as facile as nostalgia. As has been often noted, nostalgia colors everything more positively than it actually was, and although Hayman no doubt had some good times in the discos, they weren't good places. I'm sure we've all been to the equivalent of a dark hearted disco, whatever it was called. Those establishments where it seems to be impossible to make friends, with the cold pickup artists playing their intricately simple games and the bad drinks and the girls who you would never, really, want to meet: the dark hearted disco queens. I'm not going to be picking through the song line by line, but it's significant that the most pronounced difference between Hayman's narrator and the girl he's talking to comes soon after, while still talking about the disco queens: Oh sure, I bet you're right, i bet they were unhappy/Oh sweetheart you can be a child, just as long as you want. I don't take the latter line to be reassurance; he's clearly disagreeing with some part of her assertion. On the one hand, he's dismissing the naive belief that since they were unpleasant people, the disco queens must naturally have been/are unhappy - life doesn't work that way, even if it has happened to this time. But he's also, I think, rejecting the idea that we should take pleasure from their pain, or even worry ourselves with whether they are feeling pain. Life is, always, too short. A marked contrast with some of Hayman's older sentiments, for example the blunt statement in 'Another Better Friend' that No matter how you try you'll never be as cheap as me.

Which leads nicely into the advice offered in the chorus: It's only love, don't break your heart/It's only faith, don't push too hard/Cause you've got time and you can start again/It's only sex, you've got to laugh/God don't exist, don't pray too hard/Cause you've got time and you can start again. Here, certainly, is a rejection of nostalgia. But if 'What Do I Get' was the disingenious concealment of knowledge behind an affected pose of ignorance and youth, 'Dark Hearted Discos' is the opposite, Hayman hiding his lack of certainty behind cynical advice. Not that it's bad - any advice to the young that includes the fact that they are going to screw up, but that it's not fatal to do so has got something right. Hayman's ghostly, slightly tired delivery, especially on the you've got to laugh, humanizes the advice; it's not so much the "oh, you know, you've got to laugh" kind of defeatism and a command: to live, you have to laugh.

This is all matched, of course, to a steady disco pulse, reaching the heights of its effectiveness as the chorus is repeated near the end. As with all effective dance music, made in whatever way, it seems to be reaching for some sort of transcendance. And what would you get if the girl follows Hayman's advice? Someone self-contained, certainly, but that's highly underrated in our society. You'd also get someone with humour, a sense of hope, but perhaps a bit too cautious. You could do much worse. Or, as Hayman himself puts it: I am old but not wise and I think you could do better/If you've patience and tolerance

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* One of the best recent examples of this was JJ72's self-titled debut. When you have Mark Greaney howling Why won't it snow/Like they said it would you're clearly dealing with either a person in an arrested state of development or a deliberate attempt to capture something. True, the album came out before any of them were 20, but having spoken to Greaney, I can confirm it was the latter. Greaney said he has been trying to sing on that album "as if no-one had ever meant a love song like that before", and he mostly succeeds. The album thrusts you back into the mindset where everything that matters matters completely and utterly and you will always feel the way you do right now. Until the next thing comes along. One of the chief disappointments of I To Sky, their next album, is that it loses that sense of angst, although sonically all elements are in place.