Tragedy
Darker Days Ahead

There is an installation by Alfredo Jaar that I always unconsciously associate with listening to the Tragedy. Created in 1991 with the emblematic title "Geography = War", it was inspired by events that occurred in Nigeria, in Koko, at the end of the 1980s when toxic waste from Italy arrived at the port of the African city. The general carelessness regarding the materials inside led to the sale of the barrels for $100 a month. Faded and damaged labels, lack of indications of any highly dangerous content caused these containers to be completely emptied by local residents, some to be exploded or dumped unconsciously into irrigation waters, contaminating an entire area. Spreading death in a random and terrifying way. Taking inspiration from this event, Jaar combined 55 barrels full of water with photographs taken of the Koko population, which reflected on the liquid surface thanks to a play of lighting in a completely darkened room, standing out in a chilling black and white, transfiguring the water underneath into the most viscous oil. An action aimed at shedding light on one of the many social contradictions witnessed daily on our planet. Now, if you've come this far, you might wonder if I'm completely off-topic and perhaps should have dedicated myself to reviewing a contemporary art piece. Yet, the Tragedy has everything to do with this, because it's felt in their music. A perpetual sense of apocalyptic emergency and anguish, but not thinking about a utopian future, simply observing the ruins of the surrounding reality.

They don't need much introduction. Originating from Memphis, in the deep Southeast of America, capable of conceiving in the '90s the creature His Hero Is Gone, thanks to the figures of Todd and Paul Burdette, Yannick Lorrain make crust, the world and the DIY ethic their reason for living. Talking about attitude seems almost reductive. So much so that biographically, little is known, and it’s the music that speaks for them. More than speaking, it's a scream that comes from the Tragedy. A scream recognizable from the start, in 2000, with the self-titled release "Tragedy", and that years later would echo even louder with the masterpieces "Vengeance" and "Nerve Damage", setting the coordinates of a new generation’s exacerbated and nihilistic punk, raising high again the flag set in the early ‘80s by key pillars like Amebix and Antisect. Our heroes then took root in Oregon at Portland, cutting the American state from east to west, incorporating people who share their vision, like bassist Billy Davis who joined From Ashes Rise, another group that decisively contributed to the crust renaissance. The work in question is "Darker Days Ahead", the latest chronologically. A desperate glance from Tragedy at what's to come, with an added awareness, increasingly dark, where the violence materialized in hardcore flashes, typical of their beginnings, struggles to emerge. The progress is indeed slow, sick, and enveloping as if one were trapped in a cell that keeps narrowing.

Pessimistic visions built through malicious riffs blending with a hoarse rasp, without any pretense, filled with a roughness that hits like a boulder. One is dragged into a vortex of doom and sludge-reminiscent slowdowns. The crust DNA is the constant alarm that, emerging here and there, proposes wake-up jolts from martial rhythmic marches that relentlessly crash down like vultures on the carcass of their prey. Melodies that do not reassure and are not meant to relieve the dramatic tension proposed by Tragedy, if anything to reinforce and refine it. A splendid ally in equally distributing warnings about impending ecological disasters, nervous breakdowns, barren glimpses, where the spread of darkness and injustice in today's society doesn’t seem inevitable, it simply has already happened. "Darker Days Ahead" is structured to have no lapses, but to cause them. A destabilizing unease in which one cannot overlook the artistic maturity that has led them to integrate into their characteristic sound a compositional refinement that makes their assaults controlled yet more effective, skillfully balancing strident quiet, sinister interludes, and a merciless sound wall, where an incendiary frustration can explode, and why not, resignation when realizing that the atmospheres musically created obsessively recur in everyday life. A work like "Darker Days Ahead" broke six years of silence and had the credit of bringing Tragedy back to the stage as never before, integralist yet not rarefied in their crust distortions; thus highlighting a versatile ability to layer their desolate soul in articulated sound progressions. Once the thirty-six minutes of the work are over, the only imaginable thought is that one should only be grateful for the existence of artists like Tragedy who at the dawn of 2014 are a part of the history of an entire musical scene deservedly.

"There are no gravestones here. There are no cemeteries here. There are no headstones here to honour fallen ones. This site is desolate."