Released: 31/01/10

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 Badlands; raw with rejection, in Matt Black And Chrome; sinful, in Visceral Thrill; hopeful, in The Old Grand Pier.

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.

www.myspace.com/emilybreeze

James Davey