Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The line between desire and need is a thin one. Both emotional responses though are linked by the hunger that becomes apparent when the requirement for rest becomes overwhelming, and the craving for an altogether different kind of subsistence is irresistible and crushing.

The same required sense of engulfing consuming power comes when the time to place before the world all that you have been working on, the spirit that has been urging you to have your thoughts, your mind, your voice heard; the belief of your craft against the overthrowing of the need to recuperate and claiming back of your own soul.

All artists go through it, the feeling of not being in the right moment, of not being seen for the worth that you are, and it is one to get over quickly, to dispense, to hurl to the four winds, for the truth is, anyone who grasps their time on Earth to communicate something larger than themselves.

In their debut album, Before Breakfast’s I Could Be Asleep If It Weren’t For You, the expression of personal experience is one that navigates the stormy waters of other’s opinion and relies on the grace of the personal, dramatic assurance that is maturity, passion, and the sheer release of being awake to all possibilities.

In the fusion of opulent arrangements underscored by the built-up classical understanding that Gina Walters and Lucy Revis bring to the occasion, the huge responsibility that comes across in tracks such as Brush My Hair (and tell me that you love me), She, Sticky Sweet, I’m A Good Friend, and Journey, is one that embraces feeling, that sees the value in the application of discovery and passion to any art, and one that is haunting and vocally generous as any that the listener may have come across and enjoyed in their life.

It is to relationships that Before Breakfast’s I Could Be Asleep If It Weren’t For You is heavily built upon, and it is one fortified by the strong walls of doubt being defended by their actions and their ideals; and in the feminist principles they sow with precision across the delightful recording, they are to be seen as a new and formidable reason in which to wake up the lion within and roar with satisfaction of attaining both desire and need with exemplary pursuit.

I Could Be Asleep If It Weren’t For You, but who need sleep when you can be woken by the heavenly musical aroma of what is served Before Breakfast.

Ian D. Hall