Emily Breeze: Ordinary Life – single review and video premiere

Emily Breeze: Ordinary Life

Out today

Emily Breeze returns with a new sound – the speaking-singing sound that has caught the zeitgeist with Wet Leg and Dry Cleaning – and a new single, Ordinary Life. And a new animated video, premiered here today. Once you hear it you can’t stop playing it, says Tim Cooper.

We’ve been hymning the praises of Emily Breeze ever since she started making waves in Bristol more than a decade ago, first as the bastard daughter of PJ Harvey and Johnny Cash and then as the West Country’s answer to Lydia Lunch in  psych-postpunk band Candy Darling.

Since then she’s struck out on her own again as a sultry chanteuse – “Nancy Sinatra on ketamine” – with her louche attitude, spiky wit, glittering ballgowns and quirky postpunk tunes like Limousines, Ego Death and the self-explanatory Confessions Of An Ageing Party Girl.

Now, at long last, the rest of the world has finally caught up. With us, with her, and with her idiosyncratic brand of pop-noir.

BBC 6Music has been all over her latest single Ordinary Life, with Lammo, Lamé and Craig Charles all giving it spins, and listeners responding to its morality tale of “weapons-grade hope and uncut dreams” being dashed. It’s the first taste of next year’s album Rapture, which she describes, with a characteristic flourish, as “a collection of coming-of-middle-age stories which celebrate flamboyant failure, excess and acceptance.”

Ordinary Life taps into the sprechgesang style of speak-singing that has helped shoot the likes of Wet Leg and Dry Cleaning to fame. Now it’s got its own animated video by Ben Faircloth, whom Emily approached after enjoying his eye-catching artwork for Warmduscher on their killer tune Wild Flowers from At The Hotspot, a former LTW Album of the Week from April 2022. Like her last album, Ordinary Life was recorded at Rockfield Studios with her regular band of Rob Norbury (lead guitar), Andy Sutor (drums), Graham Dalzell (bass) and Helen Stanley (synth/keys) and produced once again by Stew Jackson (Massive Attack).

If this is the song that brings Breeze the breakthrough that she has been threatening for so long, it will be hugely ironic that it comes with an only slightly tongue-in-cheek song about her 20-year search for stardom. Because its punchline is her realisation – and acceptance – that ordinary life has plenty going for it after all. “One day you’ll find yourself at a friend’s fortieth birthday party, wondering how the days turned into decades, and if anyone still does drugs,” she reflects, with deadpan ennui. “And you’ll dance off the minutes and the moments and the magic and the misery and the miracles and monotonies.”

Over a bubbling bassline borrowed from Blondie, guitars slash and synths swirl as she recites the dreary details of that two-decade-long litany of disappointment. “I was a terrible waitress. And an even worse singer. But I didn’t care. I just knew something bigger – brighter – better – was on its way.” Except it wasn’t. “Twenty years later I’m still waiting.”

Not much longer, you feel, for an artist with literary talent in her genes: her great-uncle was the Irish literary genius Brendan Behan (a man whose own followers included a young Bob Dylan). It’s that same talent that works its way into her self-penned press release reflecting on a journey from a “gloriously misspent youth” through “tragic one-night stands, epic all-nighters and the quiet desperation that follows as your dreams disperse like the fronds of a dandelion clock in the cold morning air.

“You blink, two decades have passed and you become the thing you always despised, a three-dimensional, functional adult with reasonable expectations.”

Of course it wasn’t that bleak, and it isn’t that bleak, and Ordinary Life is not really “the theme song to the end of a John Hughes movie set twenty years after Prom night, except it’s not prom night, it’s Butlins and Mike Leigh is directing but Simple Minds and Siouxsie Sioux are still sparkling in the spotlight, and so are you.”

Or maybe it is.

~

All words by Tim Cooper. You can find more of Tim’s writing at his Louder Than War author’s archive and at Muck Rack. He is also Twitter as @TimCooperES and posts music daily at EatsDrinksAndLeaves.

You can follow Emily Breeze here and on Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

Source: louderthanwar.com