With a verve and a nerve, with swing and swagger, with melody and passion The Crimea show with this record that gritty drama need not be swathed in the cod stadium rock pomposity of their peers. Tragedy Rocks oozes real life recollections and observations and drags them along set to a confidently melodramatic sound track that should set these lads apart in the good old fashioned chart quest. Emotively individual and passionately charming right through to the core this is an album that track by track never fails to thrill and chill in equal measure.

Kicking itself free from the expected restraints the album opens with White Russian Galaxy, a pseudo symphony for the disaffected youth of today as they surge forward into the real world. The Jauntily bleak Lottery Winners on Acid bounds forward with a declaration of intent and suggests that the song writing here is up there on a par with the likes of Johnny Bramwell and all those other mean street poets borne of northern decline and isolation.

Opposite Ends and Baby Boom see the same lyrical style depicting the decline of life whilst musically the tracks become much more intense, there is a certain, powerful surging tide in the former, whilst the latter is very much a wholesale slice of aching melancholia examining the end of something that was once great. I think they call it heartbreak.

Tragedy Rocks, well, it might not so much rock, but it swaggers and sways, it sweeps dramatically and swoops down on those desperate lives that it considers it’s prey. The most thrilling aspect is the extreme juxtaposition of the self loathing filled lyrics tied in with almost euphoric musical epics. It is in effect a two fingers to the ties that bind, to the loves and the losses, and to the rules and regulations that seem to try in vain to dictate the way to be or the things to do. Girl Just Died explores and explains this perfectly, utterly enthralling and life affirming, despite the bleakness and despair contained within.

Through the diplomatic Losing My Hair via the impossible alt country of Bad Vibrations to the back street balladeering of The Miserabilist Tango the temptation never wanes, the thrill never lessens and the pull of this record never lets go, it’s intense and frivolous, it aches and soothes at the same time and constantly draws the listener closer and closer before spitting in your eye with a direct and absolute dose of vitriol that strangely leaves you wanting more.

Closing the album are Gazillions of Violins and Someone’s Crying, they follow on fittingly with what has gone before, the former echoing the soundtrack to some dark, haunting thriller that’d be sure to leave the most hardened movie go-er a bundle of nerves. The closing track shows just how bleakness, desperation and isolation feeds the writer, that old aphorism that talent is born of a lack of belief in the future is held up for inspection here and seemingly, on this evidence at least holds its own.

Echoes of early R.E.M, Leonard Cohen and Low reverberate around The Crimea, and that is in itself no bad thing, three acts that have proved consistently brilliant in their individual portrayals of the underdog, the disaffected and the disillusioned should welcome this record into their respective libraries and embrace this band with gusto, with faith and with hope. And then maybe we’ll all see these dogs having their days.

We can but hope.

Johnny Mac

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