The collision of the two original members' brittle rhythms and the angelic voices of Bethany and similarly fresh-faced co-singer Jo takes recent material and songs from the repertoire into shimmering club-pop heaven.
With his latest tour band, the music was warm and outgoing by contrast: horns and guitar improvised over taut, brittle rhythms, and in a centrepiece of Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time the trumpet sang as bittersweet as ever.
Above brittle, syncopated rhythm tracks, quickly articulated verses alternate with smoother choruses".
There is always a bit of this petulant creature in Coward's comic heroes, but Mr. Everett presents it with candid clarity, while never breaking the brittle, bantering rhythms of Cowardspeak.
The five members of 'N Sync usually sing close-harmony vows of endless love, the kinds of things junior high school boyfriends never say so sweetly; their uptempo tunes latch on to the new jack swing of the 1980's, which put brittle hip-hop rhythms under rhythm-and-blues crooning.
In a commanding account of Shostakovich's Cello Sonata in D minor, the martial rhythms that interrupt the opening movement's melodic outpouring felt especially charged and brittle.
His melodies were overlaid with European rhythms and his lyrics were, like the party people they were written for and about, smooth, brittle, and full of insinuations.
Quasicrystals are exceptionally brittle.
Enforced stability is brittle.
