Feats of Engineering

While healthy relationships are built in the mundane, the juice is found in the intense, indulgent world of fantasy. “Your entanglement with joy/It wasn't for her/Cleansing the heart/It's a personal matter,” sings broken-hearted fantasy Bailey Wollowitz in the final moments of their ambitious debut, Feats of Engineering. While heartbreak drives much of this record, it would be limiting to call it a breakup album. Wollowitz and partner Al Nardo give the universal experience of lost love a kind of psychedelic treatment. Small moments kaleidoscoped one another, like Saturdays brightened by breakfast with Tony Danza or chance encounters on the subway with the classic legend. Feats of Engineering it's an electric dream state, where experiments in prog, pop, indie and shoegaze combine to underline the devastating realization that, over time, all romantic memories blur into fantasy.

fantasy of a broken heart is an art-pop two piece from brooklyn. The duo split vocals, songwriting and guitar duties, with Wollowitz providing bass, piano and drum programming. You'll hear similarities to Water From Your Eyes, Sloppy Jane, and This Is Lorelei—all groups Wollowitz and Nardo spent time playing in. The two met at Bushwick underground venue Heck and then cut their teeth playing at the Glove: two eclectic DIY venues whose programming ran the gamut from gabber to stoner metal. Feats of Engineering has a similar style, belting out the poppiest melodies as freely as he changes time signatures. Consider Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen with its sweet hooks and shifting song structures, MicrocastleThe Deerhunter of the era with its driving downbeats and metronomic riffs. Notes, too, of Animal Collective's cascading synthesizers and energetic vocal cacophony. They have the unashamed ambition of an arena band with prog-rock veteran tracks underpinned by a healthy appetite for theatrics.

Feats of Engineering refuses to settle into a single set of styles. Each song follows its own logic as the record expands and contracts depending on the track. The uptempo indie pop sequence of “AFV” takes place right before the bubblegum falsettos and shiny synths of “Loss”. “Tapdance 2″—which morphs from garage rock to surf-rock-fringed by Fall to anthemic guitars and cymbal crashes—gives way to “Basilica,” a low-key textured ballad from Nardo's top that floats over shimmering arpeggios. melancholic light on the “Hallowest of hangovers”. Many verses offer a little wink. most of the production is maximalist.

“Catharsis,” the nearly seven-minute odyssey that closes the record, is the best example of how the imagination of a broken heart uses the studio to complement their songwriting. Wollowitz works their most sincere crown, waltzing over a twinkling piano. The narrator longs to be freed from the heartache, but retreats at the same time, wondering if catharsis is what they want after all. The song's central irony—a narrator who “thinks about putting the girl you love on a cloud” against a structure that heads toward its own crescendo—encapsulates the way imagination creates tension between the lyrics and their instruments, juxtaposing the posture with movement. Between Wollowitz's long prompts, a brief but searing guitar solo, and the song's final booming chords, “Catharsis” makes full use of the band's full arsenal, a fitting finale to their auspicious debut.