fantasy of a broken heart Outmeasure Bombast on Feats of Engineering
The New York City-based duo of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz seesaw through so many key-changes and tempo-shifts that the word “bombast” still wouldn’t paint the full picture of their debut record.

If you’ve been to a Water From Your Eyes or This Is Lorelei gig lately, you’ve likely been greeted by the guitar and percussion efforts of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz, a couple of musicians not as immediately well-known as their bandmates Rachel Brown and Nate Amos but who have a very good duo of their own: fantasy of a broken heart. I was not aware of fantasy until five months ago or so, when rumblings of their debut album began to bubble over. The sonic differences between Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei are vast; it would make sense then that fantasy of a broken heart exists beyond them, too. But still, you can connect all three projects with a little bit of string, luck and genius.
fantasy of a broken heart’s debut album, Feats of Engineering, is a collage of pop goodness. I haven’t been able to put it down lately. They played some of these songs during a handful of unofficial SXSW sets, but I missed them all. Nardo and Wollowitz have been on tour, through one measure or another, for so long that the migratory, non-linear sonics of Feats of Engineering makes sense with context. The story goes that Nardo canned their dreams of being a journalist after falling in love with New York’s music scene, while Wollowitz’s family has a performative background (their mom is a dance teacher) and became a multi-instrumentalist at a young age. Together, they took a turn in a punk band called Animal Show before becoming players in Sloppy Jane. When you get to interact with all of those things in a city that’s burgeoning with the suffocating expectation that you have to be something, a project like fantasy of a broken heart can be just what it arrives as to listeners: a breath of fresh air; an outlet for two best friends to bounce their creative inklings off one another.
Feats of Engineering never settles, nor would I, or should you, want it to. “Mega” is pure bedroom pop, while “Basilica” is distant and atmospheric. Wollowitz delivers spoken-word on the former while synthesizers crescendo so brightly that, for a moment, I mistake them for Nardo’s high-pitched harmonies. “Catharsis” is exactly that, as Wollowitz asks “When will I reach you?” through a skyscraping, twinkling piano melody that erupts into a glitchy, droning finale; “Feats of Engineering” is a tour-inspired catalog of California strip malls and calm mornings full of fog and palm trees, as Wollowitz declares that they “made love in an empty Waffle House while the fry cook smoked off the roach of a menthol cigarino.” It’s all grandiloquent; a couple of Zillennials executing hints of rock opera-style vicissitude through ProTools noodling.
“Tapdance 2” begins thunderously before nose-diving into a lo-fi, distant rock groove powered by the same guitar tremolo. Wollowitz gets cheeky, professing that they “read too many Pitchfork reviews” and love the band Life Without Buildings, declaring they “could’ve been born in a smaller town with a disco scene and spent more time deep in my element.” Though, it might be difficult to make out those words while you’re listening, as Wollowitz sounds like they’re singing 100 feet away from the microphone. It all works, though, as if fantasy of a broken heart want to sound like a sample beneath their own foregrounded arrangement. It’s a nice touch, and a cresting left turn from the preceding “Tapdance 1,” which finds Nardo lamenting “nobody knows what you’re talking about” through repetition that swells into heavy, languid downstrokes. Wollowitz joins their bandmate on some of those lines, until letting out a “woo” and dissolving just out of focus.