Sergeant
Symbols
STROOM
In the world of alternative music, a premium is often put on weirdness. How far can you push the envelope before music dissolves into noise? Or, as the Unsound massive might rightly push back, is there even a difference between noise and music? At what point does a record become unlistenable? Belgian band Sergeant may not have a definitive answer to these questions, but they do seem to have set up shop at the sweet spot between listenability and experimentation.
The group described their 2023 self-tiled debut as “DJ Shadow in reverse,” and its songs seemed to teeter on the edge of entropy. A veritable smorgasbord of post-punk, krautrock and spliced-up guitars, it threatened to give way under the weight of all Sergeant’s ideas and studio tinkering.
The follow-up, Symbols, is also filled with bizarro references that span the past 40 years of alternative music, touching upon dub, trip-hop, progressive rock, kosmische and numerous points in between. But as the duo grew into a trio across the writing of the new LP, they’ve also become exceptional songwriters. The songs here have a poppy sheen to them, calling to mind a pre-Dare Human League or early Scritti Politti. Yes, on “Every Epoch Dreams the Next One, Even if it Becomes the Nightmare of the Other” (in case you’re wondering, all the tracks have names like that) the stereo field is occasionally consumed by detuned instruments and clanging drums, but the song itself is also catchy as hell. I’ve been humming, “I’ll be there, I’ll be there in an hour…” all week.
This tendency holds across the album. The surf guitar licks of opening cut “Shopping for an Avant-Garde Identity in the Bazaar of Life” sound like they’ve lifted from the early-’00s blog era, when scuzzy reimaginings of garage rock from bands like Girls and Tennis were being championed on sites like Gorilla vs. Bear. Elsewhere, this penchant for song structure leads Sergeant into some unexpectedly groovy moments. The folky woodwinds and twirls on “Are You Ready to Know That Seen from up Close Things Have No Shape?” could have been taken from Hawkwind, but the underlying drum loop is closer to minimal house than the progressive or psychedelic rock canon. (That fret board scraping in the song’s latter half honestly would have been right at home during a May Day party at Club Der Visionnaire.)
For all its nods towards proper songcraft, Symbols still has plenty of eccentricities. The syruppy trip-hop collage of “A Pile of Dumbstruck Faces Watching the Universe Function Without Them” brings together cinematic strings, vinyl spinbacks and wooden drumrolls, while “My Tongue Pronouncing Words Without Consenting to Their Utterance” slowly dissolves under a dubby bath of feedback. Strangeness will likely always be part of Sergeant’s musical DNA, but on this record, they’ve figured out how to get weird while also nailing the hooks.
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