Breakfast in Fur returns with new album after 10 years

reakfast in Fur had always been a band in flux, its sound mutating as fast as friends would, well, graduate or move off to join the creative diaspora. Aside from the core trio—their sound anchored in the always adventurous, experimental drum propulsion of Peter Sandoval—the 2015 and 2027 sessions featured at least a half dozen performers from the region’s musical community, some playing more than one instrument per session. The result of this collective ethos is a richly layered melodic lattice that plays to each musician’s unique talents; in short, what could have been a mess of conflicting musical voices resolves into its own kind of unified choir.
Flyaway Garden introduced the kind of sound world Breakfast in Fur had been pining for, since it became a band capable of something more than meandering or channeling what bands like American Football had so beautifully nailed down. The success of Flyaway Garden and the welcome return to New Paltz—a Levon Helm Studio residency sort-of thing—opened doors for new opportunities, transpiring in the van-playing incident and the subsequent brain trauma that sidelined Wolfe, the in-progress recordings now found a new producer, Tom Tierney, a savvy, seasoned old hand of the ‘90s and the aughts who’d just pestered Tom Waits to finish up another tune before next winter’s storms.
The album is sequenced beautifully in album terms—songs must play in order or our delicate indie narrative will fracture into its constituent, pitiful commercial-facing stone shards. Wolfe, whose solo outings have tucked perennially into the more complex, traditional songwriterly corners of the current Catskill indie music scene, occasionally pulls entire, difficult songs out of his armpit with Von Pelt, while Van Pelt—who found herself at a career crossroads for the first time since they both said goodbye to the New Paltz All-Stars in the mid-2000s—followed the solo record with a graphic novel while setting her fingers on the keys of every Juno she could ever find.
Blue Heaven isn’t single-of-the-week music. It’s an album music, played in the Vinyl Room of your coziest Starbucks as the afternoon thunderstorms and Scandinavian colds become our new Covid realities. It’s extremely easy to catch nice inoffensive bits of songs that you hear as you do your evening food cookstaff, but purposeful enough to stave off our fragility for a full 45 minutes. The band has earned its stripes. They’re strong without being hulking, fragile without being desperate; they sound like they mean this.