Wowing us with their soft touch in the title track. Brushing up with themes sourced from Britpop, American folk-rock and even outsider music in “Elsie’s Last Stand.” Allowing for crushing brawn to amalgamate with a tender melodicism in “Desolate Angel.” Confounding us with contradictions in “Seven Seconds of Summer” while adhering to the strictest of sonic rules in “A Toy for Juliette” and “Pretty Blue Gun.” They are Fitzsimon and Brogan, and their new album is This Wicked Pantomime, a record that I would describe as being indebted to the artsy aesthetics of prog rock despite sounding like a mixtape more often than not.
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With swaggering precision and an easygoing sensibility with regards to the harmonies we find in each song here, Fitzsimon and Brogan demonstrate a willingness to stay bound to the foundations of their first album amidst hitting the refresh button on their sound in This Wicked Pantomime (no easy feat for any act, regardless of their status). Though this duo is definitely on the underground half of the industry, they’re portraying an artistry in this record that speaks volumes about their depth as creators and, perhaps more importantly, as contributors to the collective alternative soundtrack.
The guitars we discover in “Persuasion” and “Ghost of the Feast” are responsible for contextualizing the emotion in both songs beyond what any of the other instruments are capable of doing themselves, and it absolutely lets the vocalist here focus as much on tone as she does lyricism. The linguistic lashings we find in “Dancing Partner,” “Lost Love of the Pixie Girl” and “Distorted Mirror” are among the most provocative of any Fitzsimon and Brogan have ever recorded together, but I don’t think they minimize the impact of the verses adorning the other tracks here. They didn’t need to be particularly sophisticated with “The Sheltering Sky” or “The Tears of Scarlet Murder” to create a space where tone is as valid a mood-maker as the melodic trappings in the music are – by choosing to leave well enough alone, FaB let otherwise ignorable elements like noise, texture and even cadence influence how we interpret the material presented in This Wicked Pantomime.
APPLE MUSIC: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/fitzsimon-and-brogan/433472417?ign-gact=3&ls=1
Fitzsimon and Brogan enter the 2020s ready to be bigger than they ever were before, and if you were questioning their ability to make the segue from one decade to the next without hitting some serious snags in the line, you’d better think again – and hear This Wicked Pantomime as soon as you can. This has been one of the hardest years independent artists could have expected to go through, but with the dedicated studio work of veteran units like FaB, there’s a collective hope in the underground that essentially guarantees we’ll be hearing more and more incredible music like this LP in the future. This is a band that knows who and what they want themselves and their artistry to be in this next chapter of history, and for my money, theirs is a fifth album that alternative fanatics can’t afford to miss.
Kim Muncie