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Album Review

Hefner
We Love the City Belka Records 2 CD reissue

Article written by Ged M - Sep 7, 2009

Hefner: We Love The City

We Love The City is my favourite Hefner album – and Darren’s too, according to his sleeve notes – and delivered four entries in John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 2000. It’s what the band considers to be their creative and commercial peak, the latter which I recall in the marketing strategy pursued by Too Pure through videos (including 'nude suits') and multiple format singles. It contains some of Darren’s best compositions, where he absorbed C86 and Dexy’s-styled blue-eyed soul into the indiepop mix on a set of songs themed loosely around love in and of London. ‘Good Fruit’ melds intelligence and emotion, ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’ is cheekily politically right-on and ‘Painting and Kissing’ has become an indie-disco staple. The album also includes the most perfect love song in ‘Greedy Ugly People’, which captures perfectly that sense of otherness that two people in tune can feel and Darren’s romantic belief: "love don’t stop no wars/ don’t stop no cancer/ it just stops my heart". We Love The City is brilliantly arranged (by John Morrison) and produced (though Miti Adhikari refused to take a producer credit) and achieves a much fuller sound through Jack Hayter and others who contribute the pedal steel, violins, trumpet and trombones that perfectly complement Darren’s ambitious songwriting.

Including the bonus tracks (27 of them!) there's just over two and a half hours of music. It’s perfect for completists (the ‘Boxing Hefner’ tracks are excellent and the Krautrocking Electric Sound of Joy remix of ‘Greedy Ugly People’ stands out) and the extras hint at the more electronic direction Hefner would take after this album. But you can’t really improve on the original 12 tracks, a reminder of when you felt that when Darren wrote as well as this, he was speaking for all of us. Commercial success might have been elusive, and we’re still waiting to dance to Darren’s song on Thatcher’s grave, but these intervening 9 years just confirm that We Love The City was Hefner at their very best.

Links:
http://www.hefnet.com