Hefner -‘We Love The City’ (re-issue) (Belka)
Hefner’s third album, We Love The City from 2000 is viewed by the band as being their creative and commercial peak. I’d read about them in NME two years previously and had fallen head over heels in love with their debut album Breaking God’s Heart. John Peel had supported them considerably – they recorded no less than ten sessions for his programme between 1998 and 2001, and had ten festive Fifty entries.
This release saw them up their game considerably – and to listen to their debut back to back with this is to feel that it does very much feel that they had hit their stride. As the press release acknowledges, they’d moved on from their ‘broken indie-folk sound in favour of a bouncy, urban blue-eyes soul.’ Engineer Miti Adhikari didn’t want a production credit, but helped shape the album as did the band’s John Morrison on the arrangements. Darren Hayman’s love of the Beach Boys came to the fore, rather than just being paid lip service to.
Hefner always seemed like they could have been a c-86 band, which is shown partlly by having Tallulah Gosh/Heavenly’s Amelia Fletcher on backing vox, and one of the entries in that year’s Festive Fifty, the bluntly matter-of-fact ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies.’
In much the same style as last year’s re-issue of The Fidelity Wars, here the original 12-track album is expanded into a fantatsic 39 track double CD, including demos and the remixes of the singles done by the likes of Piano Magic and the Wisdom Of Harry.
A great third album, re-issued and bolstered like great re-issue packages should be.
****
We Love The City will be re-issued by Belka on October 5.
Hefner -‘Good Fruit’