Sergeant’s Symbols finds beauty inside experimental confusion

Belgian experimental group Sergeant received an 18 May review for Symbols, their second album and one of the stranger art-pop releases in the current indie landscape. The record was released through STROOM.tv and expands the band’s blend of ambient texture, post-punk architecture, surreal lyric writing and experimental pop looseness.

What makes Sergeant interesting is how they refuse to choose between accessibility and abstraction. The songs can feel inviting at first, with airy vocals, chimes, panpipes and pretty melodic surfaces, but then the structure begins to slip. Lyrics bend into complicated syntax. Familiar shapes dissolve. The music seems to remember pop music only to quietly mutate it.

Symbols appears to deepen the band’s fascination with communication breakdown, identity, anxiety and the strange feeling of being trapped inside your own attempts to explain yourself. For readers who like indie music that still has a sense of risk, this is a strong 18 May item. Sergeant do not make difficulty for its own sake. They make songs that feel like conversations overheard in a dream, where the emotional meaning is clear even when the grammar refuses to behave. Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sergeant-symbols ; Stream/buy: https://stroomtv.bandcamp.com/album/symbols