Tragedy- s/t LP (2000)
This is one of those albums where it is particularly hard to get at “what it really sounds like,” at what is really encoded in the wax grooves—so obscured is it by its own massive influence, a decade of “epic crust,” the proliferation of side-projects by the musicians here, and the massive shadow they cast even at the time.
It’s easy to forget what the 1990s were like in hardcore. Especially easy for me, since I wasn’t there. But take, for Exhibit A, the 1999 “Iron Columns” compilation on Mind Control records. Undeniably, there is some cool international hardcore here: Disclose, Krigshot, and Forca Macabra. But there is ALSO Antiproduct, Extinction of Mankind, Cress, Brother Inferior, and some nth-tier political grindcore. I’m going to throw some more names at you: the 1990s were the time of Detestation, Dropdead, Aus Rotten, Code 13, Resist and Exist, Phobia, the bad Harum Scarum album, etc.
Smart readers will object: “His Hero is Gone! Los Crudos!” But I think, if you squint, it is easy to see how those bands fit into the 1990s. Even His Hero is Gone gave long political speeches (warning against technology’s evils) before their 40-second songs.
Some day it will also be necessary to go back and hear His Hero is Gone NOT as a run-up to Tragedy *and* not as a kind-of-emo political 1990s band with dreadlocks.
In any case, Tragedy blew all of that away, as we have been taught Nirvana did to hair metal. In both cases: reductive but true.
Tragedy were a “big tent” band. They made Japanese bands like Death Side and Bastard into household names; their favorite records became everyone’s favorite records; most of all, it seemed like they really were musicians and entertainers and creative-types… for once we could speak of “song-craft” and melody!
On the other hand, listening to this album now, it sounds nothing like how I remember it. I mean, I know all the lyrics and all the parts, but it doesn’t sound like “Tragedy”—by which I mean, it doesn’t sound like The Fighting Dogs or To What End? or the “Vengeance” album.
This album is a very somber, mostly-slow affair: the kind of record that does make cellos seem like a good idea in hardcore!! “Dissonant” musically, it is extremely consonant as an album statement: the b-side is almost entirely weighted with dirges, à la Black Flag’s My War. None of the songs turn into the moronic anarchist football cheers of the next album’s “Vengeance” and “Revengeance.” It’s a kind of rainy day album.
I think the last 3 songs are just complete genius. The pacing, the heavy palm-muting, the “freakout” in “Chemical Imbalance” that comes across as being really fast and crazy despite being slower than 90% of hardcore, the transition from noodly ambient lead to chugging build-up in “Tension Awaiting Imminent Collapse”… one just really cherishes all of these parts, in the nerdy way that when you play “Stairway to Heaven” for someone, you antsily sit in your chair, nodding and being like, “Ooooh, you just WAIT! You think it’s gonna stay slow like this but… oh man!”
Of course there are total ragers here (and they cut “No End in Sight” from these sessions for use on the Totalitar split EP, and that is as big and dumb a song as there is). “You Are an Experiment,” “Never Knowing Silence,” “The Intolerable Weight,” and “Confessions of a Suicide Advocate” are toe-tapping monsters that make the album “go” and their memorable guitar commentary (not just chunky sub-grade metal riffs!) is surely the key to the band’s wide appeal.
But face it: the (later) fragmentation of Tragedy songs into “pretty guitar lines” and “shoutalong choruses” which we find on the Vengeance album, and which showed up as the “anthemic” quality of so-called stadium crust… is really a step down from the subtlety and attention to tone seen here. Tragedy’s trademark sound (I’m thinking “Conflicting Ideas” or “The Day After”) is of course memorable and rocking and well-organized—on those hits. But it falls apart so easily into MERE tone and production-values and bombastic hugeness. On this album, the parts are less than the whole, if you see what I mean.
Every time I saw Tragedy (more than a dozen, I’m sure), they played “Not Fucking Fodder.” Weird, I thought, because that song doesn’t really jump out on this album. But it really worked, even though it is basically a punk song—except for a few touches, it could be a Negative Approach tune. And this idea, that Tragedy had taken EVERYTHING GREAT ABOUT HARDCORE, THROWN IT INTO A BLENDER, and come out with *this*—whether it’s true or not, it tells you how impressive this album was on our imaginations, that such a reading was ever conceivable.
[Recommended]
