The Beal Report: Hefner’s Final Hurrah

Dead Media is Hefner’s fourth and final studio album. Originally released in 2001, it sold badly, alienated fans, and directly contributed to the break-up of the band and the subsequent “turmoil” (as he puts it) of frontman Darren Hayman’s career. So not an unadulterated success, then.

The received wisdom is that all this was caused by Hefner’s move away from the indie-folk sound of the first three albums, and into a strange new musical territory characterised by synthesisers (GASP) and drum machines (JUDAS!).

But, speaking as one of the Hefner fans who didn’t buy Dead Media a decade ago, and someone who loves old synths and drum machines, that didn’t quite wash. The problem, as I saw it back then, was that for the most part the songs just weren’t as good. It was still recognisably a Hefner album but, as sometimes happens when bands start self-consciously experimenting with new sounds, some of the soul and energy of the earlier records had been lost.

Listening to it again, all these years later, I largely stand by the verdict of younger me. Best approached as a typically quirky coda to Hefner’s career, it’s not a bad album by any means, but tellingly its highlights (like ‘The King of Summer’, Hayman’s stab at writing a summer anthem) are those songs which could most easily have come from The Fidelity Wars or We Love The City.

As with its three older and more successful siblings, Dead Media has been re-released with a whole load of b-sides, remixes and session tracks. The best of these are the songs from 2002’s Hefner Brain EP, like ‘Baggage Reclaim Song’ and ‘Can’t Help Losing You’. This was the last thing Hefner released before splitting up, so if nothing
else they went out on a high.