New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ Workman Entertainment) Brooklyn-based trio, Breaking Laces returns in fine form with a potent and relatable new album, When You Find Out, set for release on April 19th, 2011. The new record features their much known smart, witty, honest and frequently humorous songwriting style with well-crafted songs that range from pop ditties to distortion influenced rock.
"The idea was to take simple acoustic pop songs and make them bigger than life," says singer/guitarist/songwriter Willem Hartong, whose effortlessly indelible tunes combine widescreen song craft with personally charged lyrical intimacy. That's certainly the case with When You Find Out, which finds Hartong and bandmates Rob Chojnacki (bass) and Seth Masarsky (drums) achieving a forceful creative breakthrough.
It's a compellingly listenable record that exhibits new musical range for a band who has already won over a diehard legion of fans across the country with frequent touring around the country (500+ shows in 5 years).
The 12-song set consolidates and focuses the salient qualities of the band's prior work, while venturing into some exciting new musical territory with instantly memorable tunes such as "What We Need," "Hear to Stay," "Laser Beams" and "
Carry On".
"Brooklyn's Breaking Laces transcends geography - and even time, a little bit - to hold fast to the pleasant dashes of anti-folk. There's a little Lemonhead sugar and some
They Might Be Giants quirk. The trio incorporates sampling and keyboards to flesh out its live sound, but thankfully doesn't crowd the acoustic simplicity." Rochester City Paper
When You Find Out's resonant songwriting demonstrates the remarkable rapport that the three band members have developed during their longstanding partnership. These achievements are all the more impressive in light of the fact that they've been accomplished on the band's own terms, with an absence of outside hype and an old-school emphasis on honest musicianship and irresistibly melodic, emotionally engaging songwriting.
The band recorded When You Find Out in New York and Nashville with producer Ed Tuton, whose resume includes work with artists as diverse as Carly Simon, T-Pain,
Maxwell and Eagle Eye Cherry. "I think that this record shows a good range of what we do," Chojnacki asserts. "It's pretty focused, but it also covers a lot of musical ground. We dug pretty deep for this one."
Their discipline and hard work has allowed them to develop a live show whose upbeat intensity belies the musicians' seemingly mild-mannered exterior and their stripped-down lineup of acoustic guitar, bass and drums (which they augment on stage with samplers and other electronic devices).
"I love that we can go to a small club with just the three of us, and blow the roof off the place," Masarsky adds. "We've played on bills with a lot of different kinds of bands, and we've followed bands that are loud and fast and furious, and then we get up there with just the three of us and it's just epic, and people say 'How did you do that?'"