G&P Review: Tragedy

Tragedy
Darker Days Ahead
Tragedy
Darker Days Ahead finds Tragedy in that awkward adolescent stage, something akin to Neurosis' transition 20 years ago from generic crust punk band to Lords of the Cosmos and All Time. Time will tell whether Tragedy's metamorphosis will be as fruitful, but Darker Days Ahead represents that acne-spotted, cracking-voiced phase everyone was so eager to leave behind.
It also continues the transition from high voltage punk toward something more sprawling and atmospheric. I thought Nerve Damage suffered from a dearth of urgency, but Darker Days Ahead is almost comatose instead. Rather than tight d-beat punk jams, this outing Tragedy spin out a series of lengthy (four to five minute) songs played through a cough syrup haze. "The Grim Infinite" sounds like Bolt Thrower played on a Walkman with dying batteries (and couldn't you just see that song title slotting nicely on War Master?).
Where previously Tragedy broke up their albums with acoustic or more ambient interludes, for their fourth album they've stretched those lulls out into full songs, turning in 40 minutes of music that teases -- but never achieves -- a cathartic crescendo. The title track comes closest to catharsis, melding the biker odes of Amebix with the gutter glam of Anti Cimex. But every time Tragedy seem on the verge of an explosive bout of fury, they pull back and sulk off in a resigned depression rather than rattling at their cage. The suffocating production does the album no favors either. Billy Anderson does to Darker Days Ahead pretty much what he did to Sounds of the Animal Kingdom, only stonier.
Ultimately, Darker Days Ahead is a frustrating listening experience. It's not the logical extension of their early d-beaten fare and they haven't evolved far enough beyond their roots to truly let their melodicism take center stage either. Instead we're left with an awkward transitional fossil that hasn't crawled beyond their roots but has yet to grow into its full potential either.

The Namesake Series: "Darker Days Ahead"

Is there something about the name Darker Days Ahead that's cursed, that causes otherwise great bands to churn out disappointing albums? Because the name has soured both Terrorizer and Tragedy. So here are the title tracks from each, which surprisingly, taken in isolation, don't make for bad songs. So maybe my curse hypothesis needs further refining.

The Thing That Should Not Be: Terrorizer

The band: Maybe it’s just me, but bands that came, kicked ass and left only one album to mark their passing have a sort of mythic status in my mind, but give Repulsion credit for dining out on one shot of brilliance for 20 years without sullying their rep with poorly conceived new material. Even Mike Amott had the good sense to rename the band Arch Enemy when he decided to reform Carnage post-Carcass. I can think of no better cautionary tale of that than L.A.’s legendary Terrorizer who recorded one posthumous (at the time) album before Jesse Pintado joined the formidable Napalm Death Mark 3 and drummer Pete Sandoval was absorbed into Morbid Angel. World Downfall was a revelation: a death metal/punk hybrid and proof that the limeys hadn’t cornered the market on grind. So why did the band have to go fuck it all up two decades later?

The album: Insert your preferred cliché about assaulting confined aquatic wildlife with high caliber firepower here, but Darker Days Ahead disappointed me. It needed to be said.
His drinking becoming a liability (Mitch Harris has said Pintado couldn’t even get his shit together to play a note on either of his last two albums with Napalm Death), Pintado decided to reform Terrorizer and party like it was 1989. And while not bad for a grind album, Darker Days Ahead was just terrible for a Terrorizer album.
Darker Days Ahead, indeed; weeks after its release, Pintado would be dead.
Was there something wrong with the original “Dead Shall Rise” that necessitated an update damn near 20 years after the fact? Pintado obviously thought so, so in 2006 he rounded up half of Terrorizer and farted out a lame redo that served only to soon part fools (like me) and their money.
Scratch the intro, outro and re-recorded versions of demo and World Downfall tracks and you’re left with a whopping eight songs of midgrade grind. The riffs are passable and I’ve always been a fan of Anthony Rezhawk’s brutal yet intelligible vocal delivery, but what passed for Terrorizer in 2006 was a flat, overproduced shadow of its former self. Sandoval may be one of the greatest drummers to ever sit on a stool, but his playing on Darker Days Ahead is absolutely inexcusable: a clicking typewriter of poorly produced, triggered drumming.
Which is a shame, because with better production (and under any name but Terrorizer), Darker Days Ahead may have been a passable affair. “Fall Out” and “Mayhem” aren’t bad songs; they just can’t live up to World Downfall’s legacy.

The verdict: There’s a reason a Japanese grind band named itself World Downfall and not Darker Days Ahead. Skip this; download this or buy this instead.