Fragile Absolutes, the anticipated third album by alternative dark band, Tales Of Murder And Dust, is released through Aarhus' HPNG Records Collective. The album was put together over the course of three years on several locations in the band's hometown, as well as in cabins in the North-West Danish outback.
Produced by the band and mastered by James Plotkin, the new album is introduced with its opening track and lead single, Distances, an elegiac and very much dismal piece on which TOMAD reflect the Scandinavian coldness of their homeland, and parallel their sound to Swans more like any other time in the past, always mingled with their inherent ingenuity. Primarily attributable to the distant vocals, the solid array of haunting melodies and the instrumentation's all around wholesomeness, Fragile Absolutes doesn't fail to keep the listener on a dark edge for the rest of its totality.
TOMAD advance to more cinematic gravity, through gazey and post rock leaning explorations that lead to a lot of overcast, exploratory beauty, like the bleakness of the album's previously unveiled title track, and the mournful character of the lowlier, Crippled Figurines. The almost nine-minute epic Deconstructed and Dissolved, and the doom-laden Entropy show the band's unadorned audacity, and their confidence in the ingrained bleakness of their songwriting and their apt genre fusion.
Without losing its hold on the despondency which epitomizes the band's sound, Fragile Absolutes clings to a few standards and expands from there, giving rise to the band's most solemn, and possibly their most intrinsic release to date.
Cover photo and artwork by Ess Beck
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