** Hefner

BOXING HEFNER

(Too Pure/Beggars Banquet)

The London-based Hefner are the latest offering from Too Pure, the sturdy label that has served as the incubator of British pop nonconformism. But unlike such current and former label brethren as Stereolab, Laika, Bows, P.J. Harvey, and the vibrant new instrumental act Billy Mahonie, Hefner are a sonically straightforward, if droll, literate guitar band. Nothing more, nothing less.

The whimsical, multi-entendre Boxing Hefner, with a cartoon female pugilist on its cover, is a catch-up document for the newly initiated, compiling singles, BBC sessions, and other errata lost between the band's acclaimed two albums. Although they're comically self-described as a folk act, the band's slipshod guitar rhythms, as on "Pull Yourself Together" and "Christian Girls," suggest the Velvet Underground with a giddier disposition. Songwriter Darren Hayman's harried vocals recall the pasty, unnerved vocalise of the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano. Highlight "Lee Remick" (no relation to the Go Betweens classic of the same name) is a pensive ballad with a deft touch of pedal steel.

-- Patrick Bryant