Last month we wrote about ‘Orfordness Lighthouse’, the lead single from For Breakfast‘s latest EP, Trapped in the Big Room. The song “is as detailed and inventive as you might expect from a seven-piece band,” we wrote of the track, “each member bringing their own musical sensibilities to achieve a sound incorporating everything from dream pop and noise rock to trip hop and psychedelica.” The EP, out now via Glasshouse Records, shows this variety to be a signature of the London band’s sound, its inventive, genre-hopping style packing more into four songs than many a double album.
Take opener ‘Heavy Horse Museum’, its woozy psych opening threatening to rise into post-rock thunder before suddenly thinning into the slack murkiness of its middle section. Maya Harrison’s sardonically spoken delivery charges this space once more, various instruments needling from the edges and eventually gathering into a new thunderhead. But rather than get lost amid the chaos, the band ride its leading edge in triumphant embrace of the disorder. The video directed, shot and edited by Owen Neve captures some of the disorientating atmosphere:
‘OK Roswell’ strips things back for its slow-burning drama, though the entrance of Harrison’s vocals fans the flames, her proclamations pulling the various elements around them into an increasingly ominous atmosphere, winding tighter and tighter until the eventual spark unravels the whole thing into a turbulent blaze. The aforementioned ‘Orfordness Lighthouse’ offers a similar build toward crescendo, though within an entirely different manner, accelerating with elegant poise through its middle section as Harrison’s vocals are swept along in the motion.
Living up to its title, closer ‘Nervous Boundaries’ is no less ambitious, its binding momentum and swirling jazzy intricacies presenting something anxious and full of menace and constant movement. Aligning itself with the latest Protomartyr record in an embrace of dreadful unease, the song is indicative not only of For Breakfast’s experimentation, but their ability to channel this into something at once erratic and purposeful. A harnessing of chaos into pure energy. Like a descent so quick and astonishing it comes to feel like an ascension, if only for the few moments before you hit the ground.
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Trapped in the Big Room is out now via Glasshouse Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.
