Exactly one year after the magnificent See the Charcoal Rats (review), Fragile Figures is back with a three-track companion EP, Something That Blocks the Light, offering almost twenty minutes to immerse yourself once again in the poetic wanderings and electronic tensions of its ‘big brother’. Just in time to accompany the end of winter, this new offering, once again accompanied by magnificent artwork by Aaron Bonogofsky, allows us to dive back into this immediately familiar, comfortable but also nervous and cold universe.
There's no doubt about it, the two Colmar natives have their own unique recipe: their instrumental ‘cinematic noise rock’, a sound whose textures and sighs are instantly recognisable, a way of building melancholic melodies on tense rhythms, combining contemplation with anxiety. The End is Also a Beginning: like the Smashing Pumpkins, like the series Dark, like the Mayans, Fragile Figures makes this observation: from death, life can be born. The opening track on the EP returns to their trademark style, an approach full of evocation and imagery, bordering on the lyrical, but also haunted by synthetic spectres, pulsations and thick, hard, sharp sounds. Nostalgia, but also a look towards adventures to come. Let's take this title as a nod: mourning the end of the previous album, in a state of need, we are very happy to have new things to listen to! The intimidating threat that creeps into the title track, with its samples that pierce the veil of reality to speak to us from the other side, the masterful guitar work, the bass that rumbles in the background and invokes dark clouds gathering on the horizon: it sends shivers down your spine!
And while Late Fears Collision builds up a sense of urgency, anxiety and rage that grabs you by the gut until its tormented, stormy and visceral finale, suddenly, everything stops. The listener is then faced with two choices: to extricate themselves from the nightmares of Fragile Figures as one emerges from a dream, still haunted by nostalgia for this unreal moment that is already slipping away... or to remember how this new tour de force began: the end is also the beginning, hop, hop, hop, let's go back, over and over again.
