The college town of New Paltz, New York is situated just off the I-87, pretty much at the exact midway point on a drive from Manhattan to the Catskills. So it’s fitting that, on their full-length debut, local dream-pop quintet Breakfast in Fur sound like a band mediating between bustle and bliss, their hearts pulsing to the beat of tense, Bowery-beaten locomotive rock, but their heads floating at the same disorienting altitudes orbited by Upstate eccentrics Mercury Rev. However, instead of sounding like the work of an indecisive, impulsive band torn between oppositional aesthetics, Flyaway Garden overlays the two and basks in the beauty of the blur.
Like a million indie rock bands before them, Breakfast in Fur began as a solo bedroom recording project, before braintrust Dan Wolfe recruited four friends to help him project his psychedelic vision on a widescreen scale. It was a transition captured on a charmingly ramshackle self-titled 2011 EP, whose tinker-toy, Elephant 6-schooled instrumentation spoke to the project’s humble intents, while the developing vocal interplay between Wolfe and Kaitlin Van Pelt emphasized the sturdy songwriting at the core. (This push-pull was perfectly crystallized in the titles of the EP’s first two songs—one called "I Don’t Care", the other "High Hopes".) However, with Flyaway Garden’s exhilarating opening salvo, "Shape", Breakfast in Fur instantly shirk the quirk and reassert themselves with outsized confidence and bravado, as if they were auditioning for a Dave Fridmann-judged episode of "The Voice". The helium-headed melodicism of old remains—"I’d like to sleep a thousand years," Wolfe offers by way of mission statement—but here it’s sent aloft on a charging rhythmic thrust and mounting textural orchestration that effectively flips Breakfast in Fur’s script from twee-as-fuck to fuck-as-twee.
Naturally, the easiest way for Wolfe to present Breakfast in Fur as a proper band is to play a mostly silent partner in his own enterprise. In contrast to his pervasive presence on the EP, he takes the lead on just two of Flyaway Garden’s songs while dueting on another, making Van Pelt the de facto lead singer, even if her increasingly Bilinda Butcher-like voice is submerged more deeply in the mix, and applied to wordless harmonies as much as sung lyrics. But unlike so many My Bloody Valentine acolytes, Breakfast in Fur whip up a wondrous, otherworldly sound without relying on effects-pedalled guitarchitecture, embellishing their acoustic folk-song foundations with ambient synth swirls, chimes, programmed beats, overlapping melodies, or, in the case of "Lifter", flute-powered jams straight out of the Kraftwerk '71 playbook. Theirs is a form of dream pop that recognizes dreams don’t necessarily come to us in a soft-focus haze, as they’re so often rendered; when you’re in the thick of one, dreams are disarmingly vivid, high-def experiences that can shift abruptly from ecstatic to ominous. It’s a sensation best conjured by Flyaway Garden’s cover of "Cripple Creek Ferry", which revamps the frivolously folky Neil Young standard into a phantasmagoric tropical fantasia that feels like riding through It’s a Small World at Disney World after downing a bowl of ayahuasca.
Flyaway Garden makes an airtight case for Breakfast in Fur’s atmospheric allure and mastery of mood, though, with the album clocking in at a tidy 36 minutes, it’s more a collection of beautifully sculpted building blocks than a holistic grand design. A handful of the tracks—like the whirring rave-up "Aurora Falls", the Pure Phase-d "Whisper", and the dewy-eyed "Sun Catcher"—feel less like standalone songs than carefully plotted ascents to as-yet unconquered peaks; by contrast, the yearning melancholy of "Episode" shows what an affecting singer Van Pelt can be when she’s entrusted with a song that allows her to do more than just coo pretty chorales, while Wolfe’s wiry standout "Setting Stone" presents a snapshot of what this band is capable of when it matches its lofty sonic ambitions with nervy intensity. The name Breakfast in Fur can denote both the obscene luxury of 1 percenters who can afford to get a little hollandaise on their mink stole, or the primitive, survivalist instincts of off-the-grid cave dwellers; the wonderful thing about Flyaway Garden’s agrarian psychedelia is that it makes both parties feel at home.
