steering clear of the mainstream
since 2001

june 2010

review
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info opinion

Hedaya

"This Is Where I Keep It" CD

Clever Bedsit

Genres: bedroom pop, lo-fi

Feb 28 - Mar 6 2005

Hedaya is entirely the work of Simon Kean, a seriously dedicated bedroom recorder from Australia.  This Is Where I Keep It, his sophomore album, is a ten-song binge of depressed lyrics, dark compositions, and detached melodies.  Due to their home-produced nature, these songs are pretty minimal by design.

Long, basic structures are drawn out over each song on this Hedaya record, establishing an effectively sad though often bland mood.  A listener would need to really like depressed, dark hometaper pop (like Smog but strangely glossier) in order to appreciate This Is..., since often it becomes too homogeneous to appeal to the average listener.  However, the record's detached sound is at times quite inventive ("My Beautiful Blue," "Bind") - still, it could do with a few less songs to help distill the selection to a better quality.

Kean may seem a bit pretentious to attempt a release of this nature (heck, perhaps he is), but his ambitious style is by no means a bad thing - for niche experts, there is more than enough here to get excited about; you'll just have to sift through some of the filler to get to the juicy core.

76%

Matt Shimmer

[Vitals: 10 tracks, distributed by the label, released 2004]