The Breezes are back with their debut album. Following years of international touring and press, the Montreal group has made good on its promise to deliver a genuinely gorgeous classic album.
As with the meteorological phenomenon that inspired their name, The Breezes get around. Whether hopping through a Daytrotter session, skipping into the pages of Dazed & Confused magazine, or jumping onto some of the most historic stages in their home base of Montreal, The Breezes have flirted with a number of styles, guest performers, and incarnations in three years of playing together. On their self-titled LP they seem to have landed on their feet. Across ten songs in 36 minutes, The Breezes follow the Yellow Brick road to easy street, never in a rush to reach the finish line, artistic tortoises blissfully unaware of the suspiciously eager hares floating past on conveyor belts of content. It’s a pop record – and that means checkers, not chess – but denying the gilded structure present in the album’s songcraft and engineering would mean overlooking the qualities that give this album its personality.
Alongside live drummer Johnny Knowles and bassist Matthew Oppenheimer are multi-instrumentalists Daniel Leznoff, James Benjamin and Adam Feingold, a trio of songwriters who might maneuver like McKuen with Bacharach’s baton if they could only turn their amps down. How do they fit it all in? The beach, the ballroom, session string sections, flute and sax, fuzz guitar, unabashed love songs, independent rock, rock and roll, vocals stacked like pancake towers doused in the sweet syrup of harmony, auto-wah, Moog phasing, Jamaican delay, no glockenspiels, dependent rock, no handclaps, feedback, piano: put away your checklist because it’s all there.
The Breezes might be asking, “Why sing the blues during happy hour when you could take uppers for supper, time travel to the 70s, and dream of real life?” Whatever the case, the variety of material on The Breezes – a veritable jukebox of ideas and inspiration – harkens back to a time when music wasn’t something you steal between screens. There is not one downcast note here, however. “So far every person who has heard the record says the same thing: ‘Wow, this sounds like my favorite band taking a bath with my second favorite band while my third favorite band watches.’ We’re just happy to be doing this, we consider it a luxury and we’re always grateful to those that came before. And of course, we appreciate our fans so much,” says a Breeze.
Recorded exclusively at Montreal’s famed Breakglass Studios (of which James is part owner along with Breezes mentors, elusive wiz Dave Smith and Besnard Lakes frontman Jace Lasek, who both got under the hood on this release), The Breezes produced the album on their own, and James handled engineering and mixing. It was a slow process spread over the course of several years, with many stops to pay dues at the tollbooths of band life (van breakdowns, sketchy promoters, disappearing gear). Aside from working on this album, The Breezes contributed a beat to Cadence Weapon’s acclaimed Hope In Dirt City record, James earned a mixing/engineering credit on Purity Ring’s 4AD debut Shrines and the band has landed a song on the soundtrack to the upcoming Parker Posey feature film And Now A Word From Our Sponsor. The harvest is finally upon us in the form of a sonic joyride, with an entrancing live show to match. Purported to be the tip of the iceberg to a music vault containing thousands of songs, this initial offering invites the listener to become familiar with a young band committed to peace, spreading the joy of music and healing the world with good vibes. Feel that breeze?
