“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.
Houghton suffered a nervous breakdown in 2012 after releasing her otherworldly psych-folk debut, Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. She scrapped an album, ditched her band, and was eventually reborn as the punky, puckish Du Blonde on 2015’s Welcome Back to Milk. Its songs were often sleazy and messy, and she sang them with a hell-raising gusto, like she was telling juicy war stories at a dive bar. The self-produced Lung Bread for Daddy is grubby but less gleefully lurid, that fuck-you fury now curdled into something sourer. “Pull over babe, I want out,” she sings on the dingy opener, “Coffee Machine,” yet her zombie-ish drawl betrays how little stomach she has for the fight. She howls with frustration, only for the noise to stick in her throat; her guitar explodes into a ratty solo that tramples over everything in its path for 90-odd seconds, until it sputters to a stop. Even when you want out, it doesn’t mean you’ll actually make it.
The first few songs on Lung Bread feel slightly rough and squalid, the sonic equivalent of battling through the fug of a hangover. The hilarious and horrifying “Holiday Resort” dumps Houghton in a late-twenties crisis: Romance is a crock, her doctor says her eggs are dying, she can’t even drive. “I spend my days in the solace of my room,” she sings over a gnarled, fuzzy riff, “pulling pubic hairs from the crotch of my swimming costume.” Not for the last time, she’s lonely and longing for a deadbeat old boyfriend—the men here are as wretched as Milk’s rogue’s gallery of exes but harder to leave in the past, even though she knows the pitfalls of going back for more. When she lusts after a former lover on “Peach Meat,” there’s little comfort, just seedy memories and throbbing synths so filthy you’ll want to bathe in bleach.
A clumsier artist might turn this self-excoriating streak into something brutally caustic, stripping back the layers until only rawness remains. Houghton resists that impulse on Lung Bread’s later songs, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact. “Baby Talk” is filled with the spooky wail of a haunted-house organ, as if she’s being chased by an old flame’s malevolent spirit, while “Heaven Knows” mixes her smoky vocal with lavishly doomy strings, like 1960s bloody-chamber pop. On the poisonously pretty “Acetone” she reveals the misery behind a Stepford Wife smile, the sugared melodies jarring against the image of her scrubbing at her wounds in a tub of blood and chemicals.
Thankfully, though, Lung Bread is not without epiphanies. Roughly halfway through, there’s a quick one-two punch that leaves Houghton reeling but clear-headed. First is “Angel,” a petulant and grungy blast of noise that shocks her into realizing her sweet-talking boyfriend’s big promises were bullshit and blarney; it’s followed by the dirty chug of “Buddy,” which finds her trying to save a dying relationship but ultimately scornful of his suggestion that they remain friends. They might sound like small victories, or pyrrhic victories, or barely even register as victories at all, yet they’re grasped like hard-won prizes, a reward for wading through the mire. When you’re struggling to see past bad mistakes and worse memories, those moments when the scales fall from you eyes are to be savored.
