Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz collided in 2017 at the since-shuttered house venue Heck, in Bushwick. Immediately bonding over the The Flaming Lips and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the two have intermittently lived and worked together since, in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, but mostly on the road in-between, as shifting parts of pirate crews traversing the country and playing in bands Sloppy Jane, Water From Your Eyes, This is Lorelei, among many more.
the fantasy of a broken heart began on these journeys, in moments stolen while wedged up between roommates and band members in overstuffed apartments and the cramped backseats of cars. The creative outlet of two working musicians, fantasy was first just Al and Bailey writing songs, using music to track the vicissitudes of their lives and relationships—with each other and the sprawling ecosystem of musicians of which they’re a part.
When the world sputtered to a halt in 2020, the whirlwind stopped. The pair deposited themselves in Al’s native Los Angeles, taking the opportunity to hunker down with their twinned sound and commit to fantasy as a fully-fledged band. They looked back on the time they had put into their careers and each other, harnessing their powers to confront the ambiguity of the transitional and draw coherence from a myriad of perspectives.
The resulting debut album, Feats of Engineering, is both sweeping epic and a candid record of everyday moments, an emotional scrapbook filled with things that happened and things that didn’t. It begins, appropriately, with the slow, anxious beeping of a car door left ajar, gradually cut off by the dignified tones of a synthetic organ, which carry you nearly to rapture before the song launches into toe-tapping abandon: “welcome to the fantasy of a broken heart,” Bailey intones. This frenetic dynamic marks the rest of the album, which weaves moments of intimate ambience with bursts of lush orchestration, the heart-thumping bravado of drums and guitar confronting baroque dignity.
Though shaped by the surrealist endeavors of 70s prog-rock and late-90s dream pop, and the logic-eschewing rules of animated worlds, the album is ultimately tethered to reality, to music as sculpted by years of live performance. A maximalist diatribe, its sound is guided by whatever the fuck it wants, but anchored by the emotional core of its central relationship. Lyrics careen between the silly and the sincere: from cigarinos and “bibby bops'' to euphoric art and grecian pillars. Bailey’s husky baritone whispers, shouts, and croons, Al’s airy vocals twang and soar transcendent, their voices drifting in and out of conversation with each other. The title track is defined by a rare and total harmony, “What’s your intention?/Locomotion in detention/Think of jumping off a broken bridge suspension/In Middletown,” Al and Bailey sing in unison, recalling a bad day in Connecticut.
Whiffs of Americana grasped from cross-country voyages appear in panorama, alongside moments of conflict and collusion, and sometimes flashes of epiphany. Truth is buried just beneath the veneer of fiction, but these aren’t love songs, more a bundle of snapshots from the ever-shifting dynamics between two people and their respective worlds.
Al says that Bailey is the gas. They’re steering, maybe (sometimes) pressing lightly on the brakes. Indulge in their fantasy, put out your cigarette and pack your bags, or don’t, and come along for the ride.
