Fazerdaze – Break! Review

Solid workings throughout this five-track EP, Fazerdaze are starting to filter in those smarter charms and stronger messages. Break! is a fine release, a title track that inspires very little beyond that of those bedroom pop notions. Nothing that will blow your mind, but nothing that will make it feel like a waste of time either. A perfectly suitable EP that does for Fazerdaze what it does for everyone else, gives the artist time to work through their sound and start to pin some unique stylings. For Break! that appears to be a focus on the lo-fi stylings found on the title track and beyond. It feels reserved even when it takes centre stage.

Lo-fi feels and indie rock stylings are clear and frequent throughout this piece and they inspire very little. Fazerdaze can still kick it up a gear, and hopefully, it begins to improve. After Winter, though, it feels as though the topics and stylings of Fazerdaze are going to change very little from here. Echoey vocal performances do more to mask the generalities found in those lyrics than they do for the sound created here. It could do without it, but there it is. It is hard to get all that excited about Fazerdaze, a case of done better, before, elsewhere. Even then, there are those qualities within Break! that do strike through as something Fazerdaze, once they have perfected it, can offer better than anyone. Those latter instrumentals found within Winter are a key example of that potential.

But until they are utilised better and away from the electronica stylings of the vocal range on show, they will forever be stuck in some strange form of turmoil. Thick of the Honey opens with remnants of the latter days of Ratatat but soon blows it and feels like the generic electronica-pop Fazerdaze is currently offering. Thankfully this track gives a better insight into the vocal qualities presented by Amelia Murray, although the lyrical momentum, the claps that string together the verses, are in need of some refinement. These are lo-fi tracks through and through but little of it does much to express a real fundamental push for a claim in the genre standings. Suddenly ditching that for Come Apart is a strange shift that does very little for the momentum of this EP.

A taster of what Fazerdaze can offer, and what they can offer is nothing listeners haven’t heard before. “It’s just the start of what’s coming apart,” Come Apart promises. Let us hope so. Fazerdaze has something there, it just has not quite gotten there yet. Lo-fi charms that are stringent at best, are often swapped out for an acoustic piece here or a defiant push there. A bit sloppy in spots, but there is something fundamentally interesting on display, or at the very least should be on the way. If not, it is a waste of the potential showcased here in this indie-oriented piece. Murray has some great vocal ranges and ideas to present, but the lyrical refinements, the qualities that come with that match-up of great vocal and well-mixed quality, is not there just yet.