A Prog Rock Fairy Tale

Cross-legged in the grass of Central Park’s Great Lawn, Bailey Wollowitz is playing Mastodon’s “Megalodon” on their phone. The song is from the prog metal band’s 2004 Moby Dick-themed concept album, Leviathan; Wollowitz got hip to the megalodon – an ancient species of shark that went extinct during the Pliocene and grew to almost 70 feet long – by way of this epic ode to oceanic legends and giant jaws. “Bailey loves sea life,” says Al Nardo, their voice rich with the sort of affection that denotes intimate knowledge. Together, the pair are Fantasy of a Broken Heart, and their knotty, playful, highly impressive debut album Feats of Engineering features a megalodon song of their own. Only theirs, “Mega,” isn’t so much about sharks, but rather an extended riff on the old idiom that there are plenty of fish in the sea. “And,” Wollowitz explains, “[it’s like] you just happened to pick the biggest, scariest fish.”

Feats of Engineering is chock-full of oddball references like this. On “AFV”, the band namechecks the devil, The Odyssey and the 7 line, the train Wollowitz used to take from Westchester to Bed-Stuy in their teen years before landing firmly in the city. Elsewhere on the record, you’ll stop in Camelot for some “bippy bops” and “steamy dreamies” (careful ‘cause the water’s “piping hot”); go to “Doughland” to meet the Victorian critic John Ruskin; and pop by a New Jersey strip mall and a Waffle House and consider jumping off a bridge in Middletown, passing Tony Danza making buttermilk pancakes and the “possessed spirit of Evel Knievel” on the way. Life Without Buildings and Led Zeppelin II are here, too. And a basilisk. “Welcome to the Fantasy of a Broken Heart,” Wollowitz softly bellows at one point, by way of greeting into this strange, mazy menagerie of a record.

Although Feats of Engineering is Fantasy’s debut, Nardo and Wollowitz have both been around for a while, playing in other bands as they slowly pieced together their own project. Nardo, who’s from LA, moved to New York a couple of years out of high school, effortlessly transitioning from the west to east coast DIY scene. “I skipped my homecoming dance to go to my first DIY show,” they say. Those late teen years were spent learning to play guitar in their first band; both Nardo and Wollowitz came of age during a time of “capital R indie rock.” It was the era of Mac DeMarco and Jeff the Brotherhood and Burger Records – “So fun to be a 16-year-old girl at a Burger Records show,” Nardo intones acerbically – and they both came up during the boom of big, collective, experimental bands doing funky theatrical stuff with horns and reeds. Pretty soon after settling in Brooklyn in 2017, Nardo spotted Wollowitz’s “iconic blue bob” across the room at a house party. It was right there at Heck, the beloved, now-defunct DIY spot where Nardo was staying, that the two began building their world.

Before long they were living together in McKibbin Lofts, the legendary Williamsburg residence once known as a haven for artists and punks, listening to The Flaming Lips and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Herbie Hancock and Charles Mingus, and feeling like “the only two people in the universe who knew about ‘Fragile’ by Yes,“ – as Nardo puts it, with a nostalgic little laugh. In the Lofts, they began writing and jamming together: there was a toy piano, the flute, some glockenspiel, but mostly they were interested in guitar music. By 2018, they’d played their first house show.

For years they shared a “grindset,” Wollowitz working at the vegan pizzeria Screamers and Nardo at a coffee shop called Homecoming; they had long and overlapping hours, practised for Fantasy and their many other projects in the mornings, and took side gigs and Craigslist odd jobs compulsively. Nardo says they’re “off the sauce” when it comes to their habit of taking whatever job comes their way, but they and Wollowitz are still “chronic side-men” in a musical sense. They both simply love playing in bands, and regularly perform with Godcaster, Sweet Baby Jesus and The Cradle, artists who were once fellow regulars at another beloved defunct venue, The Glove. “It was such a microcosm, and super important and influential in our development as musicians,” says Nardo. “It was the best place ever. You could see any kind of music you’d ever wanna see. And everyone was there.” It’s through this community that Nardo and Wollowitz met Rachel Brown and Nate Amos – aka the weirdo noise-pop duo Water From Your Eyes – and, eventually, became permanent members of their live band.

Nardo and Wollowitz are sweet and smart as hell with distinct styles and demeanours: the former a big-eyed brunette clad in a black bolero jacket, knee-length shorts and tall black boots, with charmed clips in their hair; the latter slender in jean shorts, a backwards black newsboy cap, and a Mastodon tee. Nardo has a tattoo of a bow on their forearm; Wollowitz’s bicep bow spells AL. When I meet them across from the Natural History Museum, it’s Nardo who does most of the the ice-breaking as we walk toward Belvedere Castle, encouraging Wollowitz to tell me about their love of Pokemon while looking over Turtle Pond. Pausing in front of the King Jagiello Monument, Nardo tells me about their middle school drama career (Flounder in The Little Mermaid, Smee in Peter Pan) and first trip to New York, climbing the scalding-hot Alice in Wonderland statue. Wollowitz quietly researches the monument, which turns out to have been a gift from Poland for the 1939 World’s Fair, melted down for bullets, replaced after the war. “No one’s giving statues anymore,” they comment wistfully.

Soon enough, it’s Wollowitz who’s the chattiest, interested in a casually philosophical way about the nature of music-making, what it means to be in a band, how it changes you individually and collectively, and how they’re inspired by mecha anime – a genre in which people pilot giant robots. “Friendship is part of the magic and perseverance is part of the magic,” they say. “And there are these characters that are flawed, but they persevere and they grow and they get better and they do it together.” They tell me about how the music of anime was influenced by Brazilian jazz post-WWII; we talk about how strange it is to put something out into the world; Nardo brings up the Korean concept of nunchi, and the energy of a space, the energy of creative collaboration.

If Fantasy’s references seem unusual, or hugely specific, it’s because they’ve been figuring their band out for years. They’re perfectionists. “Normally I’ll demo it over and over and over again,” says Wollowitz, “until I think it’s good enough to show to Al. And then we’ll start from square one all over again. The form might totally change, some parts might stick. We’ll write all of our guitar parts together, then maybe demo that, then we’ll listen to the instrumental for a while, and then we’ll get together and write the lyrics.” Which is another piece to tangle, untangle, and tangle again. Nardo sings a character and Wollowitz sings a character and when the two sing together it’s another character and when other people sing with them (like Godcaster’s Judson and Von Kolk, for instance), that character is called Legion, and it functions as a Greek chorus, or a collective fool, commenting on the situation within the song. Sometimes they argue about perspective and tense. It’s a prog rock fairy tale, or Dickens in Bushwick. And it’s all about love and being in a band. 

Feats of Engineering is out September 27 via Dots Per Inch.

Writer: Leah Mandel
Photographer: Shaad D’Souza