Everything about Fragile Figures is darkly poetic and tense: the Colmar-based duo's evocations strike us right from the graphic, mysterious artworks, before the music brings all manner of spectres to life. The experience then continues live, when the silhouettes of the two musicians stand out against the images projected on the screen behind them, giving life to a universe made up of melancholy, daydreams, but also harshness. Their second album, See the Charcoal Rats, comes at just the right moment at the end of winter, as if to accompany our cold wanderings.
Charcoal. The mines, the underground, the remnants of an industrial era that still haunt the landscape: the imagery suits eastern France and gets us in the mood. Just when you think you're hearing the lamentations of the ghosts of a forgotten past in discreet, sacred choruses, the tone hardens. Coal blackens, and Fragile Figures may be a discreet project, but they have mastered nuances and crescendos like few others. Kai Reznik's pitiless programmed rhythms impose a mechanical cadence. The guitar adds its own mood. Julien Judd's bass serves as a nerve centre and, with its post-punk accents, instils anguish and urgency.
It's so beautiful you can get lost in it, and it only takes a few moments for their cinematic noise rock to sweep you away into these snow and dust-covered landscapes. Relief is created naturally. The organic emerges from the intransigence of the machines, the soul in the synthetic, the flowers budding in the permafrost. Breathless, we follow the thread of a captivating dream labyrinth as the listener is left to bring to life his own images, his own spectres.
Fragile Figures is even more silent than usual... but while the sampled lyrics are fewer, the music never seems to have spoken so much, shouted even. There seems to be a new rage inside them, something bubbling under the surface just waiting to burst forth. It's dense and the electro-indus temptations are more obvious too (L'automne, hypnotic, or the aptly named Post-Industrial Nightmare and its vertiginous descent into an abyss of rusty metal).
The duo's reveries have always had the ability to abolish the listener's notions of time and space, evoking a timeless immensity, a blank page on which you can write but above all try to remember what has been erased, like the curves of this elusive music. With I Know They're Robots and its quotation from Westworld, and then Arachnopolis, Fragile Figures links the industrial past to a dehumanised, synthetic future: whether you look forwards or backwards, there seems to be no place for humans... The only place to breathe is in this timeless present, before the finale where the guitar's laments meet the relentless pounding of the electronics: for once, the beating heart is not to be found in the beat. Synthetic noise is increasingly present, evocative of disruption and collapse. Fragile Figures tends towards the apocalyptic on an epic final track: eight minutes have passed without you even thinking about breathing.
These tortuous nightmares and timeless poetry are of a rare power. Fragile Figures don't talk, they don't show off, they almost apologise for existing. But then, what an adventure! See the Charcoal Rats flies by in the blink of an eye and, like Jack Nicholson wandering through the labyrinth in The Shining, the listener risks forgetting time to the point of listening to it over and over again, until he is in turn covered in snow, a new lost ghost added to those of the music.
