DARREN HAYMAN – Cortinaland

(CD EP, Acuarela)

Oi, yeh shoe-fetishists look up, this might be the anthem for you, and because it is such a nice, sweet, little, melodious and harmless song in the best meaning of all home-recorded guitar-pop-songs penned by ominously lonely people, that the lady of your heart might really leave her shoes on even if she goes to sleep and she wore them all day (whatever that may mean to you, I don’t care.) No, that’s just my filthy mind being rude where it really shouldn’t. Because Darren Haymen has been fascinating the world around for several years now, either with his former band Hefner (who did the best ever song about girls smoking a cigarette – isn’t that another fetish right there?) or solo or his new band.

My guess, the guy just can’t pick up a guitar without writing a song that is either heartbreakingly beautiful or stupifyingly poppy – and both times the songs will be innocent and not at all gigantic from the outside. But a week later you’ll find yourself humming that one line, e.g. the refrain from “Crissy M.” (“because her hearts not in it / it never really was”) over and over again. And another week later you are dubbing these songs onto a new tape you find yourself compiling for your girlfriend, would-be girlfriend, wife or ex-wife, even though you have no actual reason why and haven’t done so in years. Just like that. (Though you might better not make her google Crissy M by the way.)

Darren Hayman is everything that e.g. Tom Jones is not, yet I bet he has no trouble with birds as well. The sensibility of the singer / songwriter with a guitar goes a long way, I guess. Moreover, there is no girl in the world, that wouldn’t like to be sung to falling asleep with a gentle, self-penned song. Well, you could blow the harp for her as well or even play jew’s harp – but to make that work, she should already have fallen in love with you. The guitar on the other hand always works. Why a lot of those sensitive emo-types start to pick up the electric guitar to form bands is beyond me. Maybe they are intrigued by the rock-chick-style.

Someone once said about Hefner that each of their albums is the best until the next one. I couldn’t say, because I never followed them too closely. My appetite for innocent pop music is easily filled. So much so that I start to wonder if I own albums by Hefner or just am hyperpolating from a few singles or EP’s here and there. Yes, that’s very superficial and contradictory to what I wrote above, but I’ll admit my shortcomings with a word of Walt Whitman: “I am big. I contain many things.” To add one more, these songs were kind of side-recordings for Darren Hayman’s solo debut, which should have been released about now, I guess. So much for being up to date (to which I have said a lot, that I don’t care). Anyway, these five tracks fill my cold winter days with warmth and light.