Emily Breeze is a romantic.
Like all romantics she reaches to bring back lost time. Leonard Cohen’s arch wit, The
Cramps’ lurching sleaze, Patti Smith’s she-rebel swagger. Thus The Penny Arcade is a record rooted in
the soil of rock ‘n’ roll past. When performing live, she often seems to be
singing herself in and out of madness. It’s the tension in this line between
passion and madness, more than the savage energy of her group, which characterises
her debut album.
Emily Breeze
knows love. She knows its neurotic rituals. They’re there, weaving their way
through the album like an insidious snake. She also knows madness, as shown in Monday’s Right Hook, when she leads the
group into the final chorus by bellowing “BREAK
IT! SMASH IT!” with such spiteful glee. Breeze’s unsophisticated, abrasive howl is impossible to ignore –
but what’s most striking is that track after track she tip-toes the line
between love, lust and madness: succubus, in
The question raised is: what
kind of love is this? Unrequited? Obsessive? Or perhaps, like Ophelia’s,
delusional – the amorous subject imagining themselves to be the object of love,
before eventually reacting with rage against it.
Rock ‘n’ roll is theatre,
but, somewhere in the space between words and performance there has to be
truth. Poetic truth comes in the people you write/sing about; their hopes and
despairs, their conflicts, their loves. It’s in her perception of the beauty of
life’s cracks and tears that Breeze finds
her version of ‘truth’. And through it plays a grotesque gallery of different
masks: shaken; maddened; hopeless.
Each one that slides to the
floor reveals another.
Passion, love, madness all
framed, not by snarling Stooges
rock, but a mix of swooning country balladry and sinister, foot-tapping
rockabilly. Only occasionally do the group up the tempo enough to break a
sweat. Attempting to replicate the thunder and feedback of their live sound
would have risked losing all of the albums intimacy.
Emily Breeze
is a romantic. The Penny Arcade a
romantic record – regardless of which mask Breeze
chooses to wear. It deserves your attention.
