The Beat Surrender

This year has been a great year for me as far as musical surprises go, I’ve picked up debut albums by the likes of The Shortwave Set and Hard-Fi and been blown away by the fact they have done something different to everything out there at the time. Likewise one of my favourite albums this year came from Frank Black with Honeycomb, somebody I never thought would produce a solo album to match his Pixies work. Sebastian Tellier has snuck upon me and produced an at times brilliant and at times bonkers dance album but even that didn’t match the Vitalic album as far as that genre goes.

So what the hell has this got to do with The Crimea album Tragedy Rocks, even by one of my babbling monologues this is surely stretching it?

True, so I’ll press on, in short The Crimea have produced a surprisingly delightful album to add to that list. Tragedy Rocks is something that when I first put onto my discman (sorry still not had the money to join the Ipod revolution I’m afraid, but if you want to send me one free then you’ll find my address in the contacts page yes I know that’s shameless) to ease the journey to work ahead of reviewing it, I had so little expectation of it.

Sure I’d bought a couple of early singles, like John Peel who put Baby Boom in his top ten in the Festive Fifty in 2003 I’d seen some talent and I liked what The Crimea were doing, but nothing at the time suggested that this long player would become one of my favourite long players of this 2005 just a couple of years later.

The band as a whole are talented and I don’t want to put too much focus onto the main man, but Davey MacManus is the main focal point of the band, everything revolves around him and no song passes with him somehow conspiring to steal the show. Yes you might notice the sweeping drums on The Miserabilist Tango catching your ear part way through the song as it turns into a sonic finale, you might even be drawn into the album by the gentle piano opening of White Russian Galaxy but ultimately it’s his ability to carry any song, be it the darker, dense chorus on Opposite Ends that turns into an almost psychobabble in the verses or the melodic tracks like Bad Vibrations, everything comes back to MacManus.

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