Following 2023’s excellent Rapture album, Bristol’s wild and witty indie-noir-pop-rock star returns with her special brand of acid-tongued, savagely funny, powerful and poignantly catchy numbers, with a title inspired by a song by The Birthday Party, mixing glitz and the gutter, and “imagining rats with top hats and canes having the time of their lives”. Dirtily droll and also debonair, Breeze has a naturally powerful presence, with opener Romance Is Dead bringing instant double-edged drama and singalong swagger. But standouts include the single Fun, with its fuzz-guitar, sexy, sleazy sound, a song that mocks her own tendency to always put pleasure before business, with an added bitchy putdown gag (“I had fun with your mother … I had so much fun that it made me sad … but one thing’s for sure I had more fun that you.”) Dating A Model is a glorious string-laden waltz-time swoon of a song, and a caustic, stinging mockery of the concept of the ideal partner, with stylish half-talking asides: “talking shit with cocaine communists … ‘cos she’s so much younger than you.” There’s also something of The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde in Breeze’s arresting delivery here, and also in Forever Money, a sharp, classic song about best-laid plans, packed with cultural reference from Frank Sinatra to cheap wine and Only Fools and Horses (“This time next year, we’ll be millionaires”) and other ironic, killer lines, such as “you were vulgar as leopard print / I was cheap as confetti” or “we thought were invincible, but the hangovers were biblical”.
So the belting numbers keep coming thick and fast, with the half-talky Yesterday’s Parties, or the nostalgic reminiscences of the punchy guitars, brass, and synth-pop of 1997 (“We were Rage Against The Machine … with Lynx Africa …”). Other highlights include a great rock-synthy cover of Paul Simon’s Graceland, bringing something new to such a familiar song'; the hope-filled/cynical, soaring, The Beatniks; but especially the bittersweet, powerful, We Were Lovers setting the scene with “somewhere out in the multiverse we are are laughing and joking and the vast cosmic joke of it all as we casually transcend the beginning and end of one another …. falling in love in you was like waking up to find work has been abolished”. Brilliant at capturing the circular nature of romance, hope’s tension with hopelessness, but that inevitable, ever returning, irresistible appetite for more of life’s highs, lows, pleasures and adventures, Breeze is back at another bite for big success, and deserves as much as she can get. Fantastic. Also catch her on tour over the summer. Out on Sugar Shack Records.
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