If all the think pieces in the world couldn’t settle on how exactly the world has changed, let us at least agree that it has changed, in complex ways that become more difficult to parse with every day. In 2012, Daniel T. Rodgers penned a book in which he posited that Western society underwent an epochal crisis of confidence following World War II. “Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones,” he wrote. “Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.”
This seems relevant when discussing the ambitions of CYMBALS, a London band who’ve titled their latest and greatest album after Rodgers’ book. When the band first debuted they were on the scrappy side of post-punk, releasing their energy in brief, nervous bursts. On The Age of Fracture, they’ve settled down and drawn out a solemn groove, furthering a sound indebted to bands like New Order and Depeche Mode, acts who sensed that sometimes the best way to solve an existential crisis was to leave it all on the dancefloor. The album opens on a dreamlike note, synths slowly floating in as drum machines layer into a smoky, sublimated release; it sets the tone for “The Natural World", where singer Jack Cleverly nearly goes hoarse yelping about the trials and tribulations of getting to know someone as the groove snaps like a rubber band. “I don’t know enough about you,” he sings, “to be kind to you." It’s an admittal of narcissism given an honest feel through the song’s orgastic form, in which synths interlock and flow into a crystalline river. Because who could lie when they’re moving that freely?
The band is largely concerned with degrees of distance and the ways in which the age of fracture describes not just the geopolitical world, but the interpersonal one. If that sounds like a big pill, well: These songs are much longer than anything they’ve ever done, and it sometimes it feels like a minute or three could’ve been lopped off here and there. “Like An Animal” slows the groove to a crawl as Cleverly intones self-involved lyrics like “Nobody’s looking/ No one cares” in a way that’s reminiscent of Peter Gabriel at his most tortuously ponderous. They’re much better when keeping it simple, like when they ride the stripped down riff on “Erosion” toward crescendoing exultation. There’s propulsion, but a softer type. Take a song like “This City”, which hums along somnambulant rhythms as it considers how to make a weary life feel less trivial, or the interstitial self-titled track.
That’s the realm where CYMBALS work best, when they use understated sonic brushstrokes—a flutter of synths here and there—to deepen the mood. The penultimate song, “The End", feels characteristic of its title, which refers to the conclusion of a long night spent with someone you barely know. Then, just as the lights turn on to send everybody home, there’s the hopeful denouement: “Call Me", out of which a burbling bass line anticipates a necessary amount of sleep before the next night out. The range of states is what makes the record convincing: CYMBALS do enough to get you moving, and through that, thinking about where we are in relation to each other.
