“Want it, you want it, you want it, you want it/But you’ll never get ahead of it,” fantasy of a broken heart announce sweetly at the outset of “Passion Clouds,” the opening song on Chaos Practitioner. The line resurfaces two songs later on “Have a Nice Time Life!,” suggesting that it might be something like a motto for the duo of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz: Zapping across decades’ worth of brightly colored, hi-def pop tropes as though flicking through channels with the cable remote, fantasy of a broken heart seem to be racing to keep pace with the speed of their ideas.
Nardo and Wollowitz, supporting players with Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei who first played together in Sloppy Jane, assembled Chaos Practitioner from recordings made at home and brief blasts of creativity on tour. Stitching the pieces together with the assistance of Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos, the duo distills the genre-hopping art pop of last October’s Feats of Engineering into a dense, restless EP that packs six songs into just 19 minutes.
The whiplash pace of Chaos Practitioner is less a visceral sensation than a head trip. fantasy of a broken heart fill every corner of the margins with busy doodles: springy drum programming, processed vocals, strange time signatures, throwback electronics. Nervous overdubs and compulsive countermelodies undercut their fondness for sumptuous soft rock, creating a woozy sway that’s heightened rhythms that skitter around the beat without settling into a groove for long.
That velocity can be invigorating. “Passion Clouds” gallops out of the gate with a cheerful, insistent pulse—part motorik, part indie pop—before a zig-zagging rhythm threatens to overwhelm the melody of the chorus. The duo pulls off a similar misdirection on “Victory Path,” submerging the song’s hooks in thick, dissonant layers of lysergic vocoder. They succumb to soft rock on the country-inflected “Road Song,” which sounds like a 4K version of some of Jim O’Rourke’s experiments in classic rock and pop, but even here, they seem determined to avoid anything approaching a straight path. Despite their tuneful inclinations, fantasy of a broken heart are unable to resist the pull of gleeful cacophony; an impish sense of humor runs through their colorful arrangements even when the sentiment—as on “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways,” a song about toxic relationships—runs much darker.
Sometimes, fantasy of a broken heart appear so intent upon subverting established pop forms that they seem to lack the patience to write a song that ebbs and flows of its own accord. That’s not the case with “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways,” which retains the spirited energy that drives the EP but eases into a more linear, relaxed groove and draws it out for nearly five minutes—the longest song here by a considerable margin. It feels like a coda to the frenetic explosion of sounds that has preceded it, a satisfying conclusion to an EP that contains more ideas than many records three times its length. After darting from peak to peak across the previous five songs, fantasy of a broken heart finally find the time to slow down and take in the view.
