Trapping the wonderland majesties of Maurice Ravel’s interludes, inside a psychedelicious post-whatyamacallit fever-dream, For Breakfast’s follow up to 2020 ‘Songs in the Key Of O’, presents gripping reformulations and eclectic confoundments.
Recorded in a decommissioned air base in Suffolk – the location of U.F.O sightings and Cold War operations – there is, somewhat understandably, a patina of fifth-dimensional, preternatural quintessence emulsifying the wild variations prevailing on ‘Trapped…’.
While so clearly the product of seven distinct musical personalities, the EP pulls in unified formation, despite the genre-abundance that swells it. Home to the EP’s more tender moments, ‘Ok Roswell’ and ‘Orfordness lighthouse’ breathe balladic strains resembling the indie-melodia of an Angel Olsen or Du Blonde. Delicate Flute/sax-driven sophistications provide taints of old-world romanticism.
Well-positioned blocks of epic on opener: ‘Heavy Horse Museum’, undertake Godspeed You, Black Emperor- proportioned cinemascope endeavour. A tragic-glam, end of the world quality takes hold too. Enforced by Mick Ronson-esque guitar shreds, For Breakfast contain a gleeful propensity to ‘let rip’, as were, to crown a tune with showers of sparks and righteous crescendos.
The most enthrallingly face-crumbling of the bunch, ‘Nervous Boundaries’ motors to a serpentine groove, chasmic and nebulous like the assembly of a solar system. Vocalist Maya Harrison propheteers like some witching 60’s soothsayer – Shocking Blue’s Mariska Veres perhaps, alone on a blanket of desert, in the howling dust-wind. “I am wandering the boundaries of the earth.” It’s a grandiose finale befitting For Breakfast’s craving to unlock, and traverse, the largest musical spaces.
Issue Thirty-Seven is out now Ft. Porridge Radio, Crows, Folly Group, The Dinner Party, Automatic, Gently Tender, headboy and more. Buy in print here. Read the digital edition below.
