You can tell that an artist really understands the power of music when they are able to deliver tracks which are about mood rather than melody, anticipation and atmosphere rather than anything as unimaginative as lyrical hooks and the usual pop and rock gimmicks. Brittleness is just such a track, a drifting collage of textures and tones, each bleeding and blending into the other, sometimes drifting almost out of earshot, sometimes dancing with the listeners very soul.
And as if the ability to make such music isn’t enough, Brittleness then plays its trump card and shifts tangentially from the soft and ambient soundscapes it first cocooned itself in into more fractured and glitch-ridden sonic territory. Disembodied voices meander across off-kilter anti-rhythms and industrial counter-melodies and the very structure of the song breaks down and disseminates into wave after wave of intriguing kaleidoscopes of sound.
And there is a perfect parallel to be found in the video, at first a serene picture of decedent delights from decades past, of danger and intellectualism, the occult and the illicit, and the imbibing of Absinth. And then the effects of such heady hedonism. The music is perhaps a reflection of that induced trip, that psychedelic journey to the soul. A slow descent, initially warm and welcoming before the liquid takes hold and replaces it with a splintered madness, dark, foreboding, chaotic.
It’s music which tells a story in its own subtle and supple way, music which is a narrative in its own right without the need for direct lyrical communication. And that is an art unto itself.
altbabylon.com 
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