We're all suckers for sentimentality, but typically we ourselves choose the objects of our sentiment and find it irritating to have to endure another's. Listening to Hefner's latest release, Dead Media, comes across as just such a laborious experience. For whatever reason, Hefner made a conscious decision to strip down their sound, retreating to their bedrooms with analog synths and an eight-track recorder. To cop Thoreau: "to record so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not music, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive music into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms." The result of this self-imposed hermeticism is neither mean nor sublime, but simply trite. What's good for the soul isn't necessarily good for the ear.
Jan Hammer and Yaz are good in small doses, but they're mostly good for a chuckle. I might download a few tracks in homage to Sonny Crockett, Ricardo Tubbs and immortal Miami pastel cool, but I'd never want to sit through an entire album of hollow, pre-programmed beats and electronic handclaps. With this release, Hefner apparently feels it's time for a revival of these clichés.
Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums. Songs like "The King of Summer" show off the band's potential songwriting prowess, but most of the songs here are blatantly precious and generally as awkward as their primary subject matter-- puppy love and early teenage sexuality. "Peppermint Taste" is a fine example, a reminiscence of a first kiss and feel-up under a tree which tries to counter the obvious and squeamish delivery with what I imagine are supposed to be biting comments: "Now it's been twenty years, I bet you kiss real good/ I bet you kiss your banker like a banker's wife should." As with most of the attempts at irony throughout Dead Media, it falls flat.
The only track in this "experimental mode" that works is "Alan Bean," a "Major Tom"-style space adventure that's successful because the campy synths and space sounds give the song a cartoonish quality that belies its desperation and hope. There are also some passable songs, like "Junk" and "When the Angels Play Their Drums," but then there are others like "China Crisis" which are handled so ineptly that they inspire three solid minutes of cringing.
It's clear that Hefner's intention was to take complete control of the creative process by living with these machines for a while, and to create a little masterpiece of Brian Wilson-esque simplicity and charm. But obviously, they're not quite so deft with this equipment as Wilson was, and it all comes off as a bunch of sophomoric tinkering. If they felt that this amateurish sound would illicit a flood of vintage memories and a collective sentimental sigh of recognition, they were just plain wrong. For me, it actually has the opposite effect: a shriek of recognition and a dash for the stop button. You're better off sticking with vintage Pet Shop Boys and ABC.
