Album Review: Lung Bread for Daddy by Du Blonde

Beth Jeans Houghton presses on the darkest part of the bruise to reveal bracing home truths with this glam-infused second record as Du Blonde It's been four years since Newcastle's Beth Jeans Houghton became Du Blonde for acclaimed second album 'Welcome Back To Milk', emerging as a glammed-up, fire-breathing garage rock star. In the interim, she's been painting, made videos for Ezra Furman and Red Hot Chili Peppers, worked on a novel, released a comic book and battled the loneliness and anxiety. 'Lung Bread For Daddy' is as much a naked confessional as it is Houghton showing off her complexity, album highlight ‘Holiday Resort’ blending the soul of her first record and the snarl of the second to best show where she's at now.

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There’s something of the Alison Mossharts to Du Blonde - aka Newcastle-born, London-dwelling singer Beth Jeans Houghton. Trading her previous folk guise for a more direct, uncompromising and riffier slant on previous LP ‘Welcome Back to Milk’ and her latest ‘Lung Bread for Daddy’, The Kills singer is perhaps the only modern comparison who quite fits her combination of no fucks given rock’n’roll badassery and more sombre, nocturnal vulnerability. It’s a winning one, and on ‘Lung Bread…’ the singer gives both sides room to flourish.

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Welcome Back To Milk displayed a wide range of stylistic variations on the glam rock theme, nailed down with deadly wit and enough self-seriousness to all the excess to transcend it safely above parody and even derivation. If it was a circus, Lung Bread For Daddy's show lights are long extinguished and the big top tent seems a hell of a lot smaller and more smothering in the dark. Written at a recent low point in her life, Houghton peels away much of the arrangement décor from her prior outing, laying her songs largely bare before us.

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"There's a sick pleasure to be found in writing honestly and grotesquely," Beth Jeans Houghton has said, and it rings true: On the unflinching and uneasy Lung Bread for Daddy, the truth will set you free and make you queasy. More than ever before, the Newcastle singer-songwriter grubs around in the messiest, muckiest moments of her own past and digs up the kind of ugly memories most people would rather leave buried underground forever: the doomed relationships, the grisly fights, the moments of weakness when you should know better. On the cover of her last album she wore nothing but a fur coat and merkin, but it's on these songs that she feels truly exposed.

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Du Blonde -- FKA Beth Jeans Houghton --possesses a soul-crushing voice expressive of her constant struggle against sadness and loneliness. In fact, if you spin each one of her albums chronologically, she seems sadder with each passing record but increasingly profound nonetheless. Needless to say, this slow emotional descent has galvanized Du Blonde, culminating in the artist's best and most crystalline work yet and what she deems, "a new incarnation and one step closer to assuming [her] ultimate form," with her entirely self-made record uniquely titled Lung Bread for Daddy.

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Following a time of spiritual and musical rediscovery in Los Angeles and fresh from a successful side-gig as a music video director (for the likes of Ezra Furman and LUMP no less) Newcastle-Upon Tyne artist Beth Jeans Houghton has returned to her Du Blonde persona, older, wiser, and with a clutch of addictive, skillfully crafted songs. High among the illuminations on this record are the slow, bar-closing blues of opener "Coffee Machine," on which Houghton cries breathily for human connection— "I'd rather have the man than the coffee machine. " The low-slung buzz of the delectably titled "Peach Meat" is an echoing, stark creature that morphs into a Pixies-rocker of no small stature with its wordless chorus and electrifying guitar and bass work.

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