Album Review: Heartless Breakers - 'Lighter Doses'

Lighter Doses isn’t just another acoustic EP for the alternative rock folk to colour their Sunday afternoons with. Sure, the plucky acoustics, crooning vocals and discreet violins spell a recipe for the kind of record you could fall asleep to, but Light Doses is the opposite – a splash of water to the face to wake you up from the stupor. It’s heroically honest, franticly hopeful and full to the brim of lyrics that will tear at your heartstrings and make want to stay up until sunrise.

At a brief but powerful 30 seconds, ‘Distractions’ is, like the rest of Lighter Doses, organically recorded and it’s for this precise reason that our acoustic ‘experience‘ is an unusually gripping one. The lead vocals grasps the crux of the clean, transparent mixing for this record, and are in particularly fine form in the records’ most staying offerings – ‘Morals and Motives,’ and the record’s shoelace track ‘CTTD.’ Here, the vocals do well to remain strong, while leaving the melancholy violins and slow building acoustic riffs to play their part.

It should be duly noted that this record isn’t a jolly sing-a-long kind of soundtrack for your moonlight campfires and backyard barbeques. Lighter Doses is a whole lot darker that first expected, with ‘Burn and Bury’ and ‘Monologue’ subserviently revealing a sense of ingrained, probing sadness that is hard to shake, even after the headphones have been discarded.

Preferring to keep things personal and coloring just outside the lines, Heartless Breakers write songs that expose their insecurities (I think I need the Medicine, It counteracts the thoughts I process) and humbly reflecting those of the listeners (she wants to feel other breathing straight down her spine).

Lighter Doses is achingly powerful, and displays, of the small scope of an EP, a surprising amount of emotional and musical maturity unexpected from a band this young, and indeed, of a such a modest record. Passionate and organically enchanting in every breathtaking moment, Lighter Doses should make people sit up and take notice of Heartless Breakers.

1. Distractions 

2. Morals and Motive 

3. Daily Restraint 

4. Burn and Bury

5. Monologue

6. Bitter Melodies 

7. CTTD