Nothing Concrete’s new album, “The Imperfectionist”, is less a collection of songs and more a vessel that’s been around the world a few times, collecting scuffs and stories. It’s a beautifully unsteady thing, this record from the duo of Fergus McKay and Gaia Miato. They’ve crafted a dusty, globetrotting shuffle where bluesy resignation and the dramatic posture of tango are held together by the honest sinew of folk. The whole concoction sounds like it was recorded in a back room somewhere in Foix, with the windows open to let in the noise of the past and the uncertainty of the future.
This is music about decay. Not the romantic, beautiful kind, but the real, splintering rot of things—hearts, societies, moral compasses. It feels less like listening and more like running your hand over old, water-warped wood. You feel the grain, the chips, the deep grooves where a promise once lived. For a moment, a specific guitar line reminded me of the colour of verdigris on an old Parisian fountain, that patient, beautiful corrosion. That’s what they’re doing here: finding the strange textures in collapse.
Yet, amid the wreckage, a defiant pulse beats. This isn’t the sound of a fist-pounding revolution. It’s the slow, undeniable power of the tide, or a flock of birds turning as one against the wind. The album proposes resilience not as a heroic act, but as a collective, natural state of being, leaderless and instinctual. It champions the cracks, suggesting that integrity isn’t about being whole, but about how you hold yourself together after you’ve come apart.
“The Imperfectionist” isn’t a comfortable journey, but it’s an achingly human one. It leaves you with a question that clings: can we only learn to fly once we’ve been thoroughly shattered?
