While healthy relationships are built on the mundane, the juice is in the intense, indulgent world of fantasy. “Your entanglement with joy/Was not about her/Catharsis of the heart/Is a personal affair,” fantasy of a broken heart’s Bailey Wollowitz sings in the closing moments of their ambitious debut, Feats of Engineering. While heartbreak propels much of this record, it would be reductive to call it a breakup album. Wollowitz and bandmate Al Nardo subject the universal experience of lost love to a kind of psychedelic processing. Small moments kaleidoscope over each other, like Saturdays brightened by breakfast with Tony Danza, or chance encounters on the subway fringed with classical myth. Feats of Engineering is an electric dream state, where experiments in prog, pop, indie, and shoegaze combine to underscore the devastating realization that, with time, all romantic memories blur into fantasy.
fantasy of a broken heart is an art-pop two-piece from Brooklyn. The duo splits vocals, songwriting credits, and guitar duties, while Wollowitz supplies some bass, piano, and drum programming. You’ll hear resemblances to Water From Your Eyes, Sloppy Jane, and This Is Lorelei—all groups Wollowitz and Nardo have each spent time playing in. The two met at Bushwick’s basement venue Heck, then cut their teeth playing at the Glove: two eclectic DIY spaces whose programming ran the gamut from gabber to stoner metal. Feats of Engineering is styled similarly, plucking the poppiest of melodies as freely as it changes time signatures. Think Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen with its honey-sweet hooks and shifting song structures, Microcastle-era Deerhunter with its driving downbeats and metronomic riffs. Notes, too, of Animal Collective’s cascading synthesizers and energetic vocal cacophony. They have the shameless ambition of an arena band with the musical chops of prog-rock veterans, underscored with a healthy flair for the theatrical.
Feats of Engineering refuses to settle on a single set of styles. Each song follows its own logic as the record expands and contracts on a track-to-track basis. The uptempo indie pop of “AFV” is sequenced just before the bubblegum falsettos and glossy synths of “Loss.” “Tapdance 2”—which morphs from garage rock into a surf-rock-fringed take on the Fall into anthemic guitars and cymbal crashes—gives way to “Basilica,” a restrained ballad textured by Nardo’s upper register floating over chiming arpeggios that shine a melancholic light on their “holiest of hangovers.” Many lyrics offer a little wink; most of the production is maximalist.
“Catharsis,” the nearly seven-minute odyssey that closes the record, is the finest example of how fantasy of a broken heart uses the studio to complement their songwriting. Wollowitz works their sincerest croon, waltzing over a twinkling piano. The narrator yearns to be released from heartache yet relents at the same time, questioning if catharsis is what they want after all. The song’s core irony—a narrator caught in a loop of “thinking about putting the girl that you love on a cloud” against a structure that throttles towards its own crescendo—encapsulates the way fantasy builds tension between their lyrics and instrumentations, juxtaposing stasis with movement. Between Wollowitz’s grand, reverb-washed exhortations, a brief but scorching guitar solo, and the song’s final thrashing chords, “Catharsis” makes comprehensive use of the band’s full arsenal, a fitting finale for their auspicious debut.
