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☆☆☆☆☆ - Lust For Life Magazine

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there,' is a common phrase uttered among free-thinking spirits. With their psychedelic, mirage-like sound, The Small Breed take that sense of freedom to heart. Music of the past often adheres to retracing its steps in purist, traditional fashion, but this Dutch five-piece embraces the role of dissenters and mutineers with a strange mixture of curiosity and obliviousness.

The Small Breed is a band exploring all roads not taken like shipwrecked souls tasting new exotic fruits with abandon. The band’s full-length debut Remember A Dream is an ode to the rare birds of paradise that dwell in their midst, the non-conformists and eccentrics who reject reality as something rigid and absolute. The Small Breed’s hazy, phantasmagorical stratospheres bring to mind The Beatles, The Byrds, King Crimson, The Moody Blues or Syd Barrett, albeit filtered within their own, often outlandish aural parameters.

The album’s opening title track was inspired by a lucid dream by singer Guus van den Heuvel about a floating village, only to later realize the dream was projected with scary accuracy in an M.C. Escher painting he had never seen. The lush, honeyed ‘Wanda Your Angel’ was partly inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s famous novel Venus In Furs. Instead of doubling down on the seedy and risque, The Small Breed wrap its subject matter – sadomasochism and bondage – in the warm, magnanimous blanket of a classic love song.

Much like records such as Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O. or Kevin Ayers’ Joy Of A Toy, Remember A Dream invokes the notion of malformed purgatories, little pockets of experience outside of our daily realities. Each song greets you artlessly like a choose-your-adventure storybook, and as far as sonic experimentation goes, The Small Breed went all-out in their inquisitiveness whilst recording these songs. The carnivalesque ‘The Man Who Lost His Consciousness Of Time’ ironically ends with hundreds of alarm clocks going off. ‘The Fifth Season’ – arguably the most sinister sounding song penned by The Small Breed so far – applies eerie tape looped vocal recordings to capture that odd tipping point of a bad psychedelic experience. The many wacky studio experimentations give each song a perplexing character of its own.

Even thematically, Remember A Dream pays homage to night owls and other meaning-seeking cowboys of the night. The music touches on loneliness, emotions, love, self-reflection, opportunities and dreams like an omniscient narrator. The playful alternation between sunshine and carelessness on the one hand and unconventional and Freudian themes on the other. Ultimately they embody the tiny cracks within the maze of existence that make us wonder whether we’re truly happy and free, or merely lost in an illusion.

As tangled and twisted as these questions seem to manifest, The Small Breed’s music takes solace in simply entertaining them. Whenever in doubt, this bunch embraces adventure above all else.

- Jasper Willems

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there" is a common phrase uttered
among free-thinking spirits. With their psychedelic, mirage-like sound, The Small Breed take that
sense of freedom to heart.

Our first full-length album 'Remember a Dream' will be out on the 1st of October via Bickerton Records!