There’s no romance in a Nothing track. There’s no glamour, triumph or tragedy, even though each of their albums is born out of the third. Nothing never bemoan their lot. Their days, like ours, are made of bad decisions and bad luck. Their lives, like ours, a series of unfortunate events. And while we can live in the hope that tomorrow may be a better day, it probably won’t be.
There’s no sadness in this revelation; just a quiet acceptance of an unchangeable reality. There’s no anger, except towards impossible optimism thrust our way. ‘Vertigo Flowers’, the first track we heard off Tired of Tomorrow back in early March, is possibly the most overtly hostile song on the album, opening with an unembellished: “I hate everything you’re saying”. It’s a sonic powerhouse that manages to legitimise rather than stigmatise feelings of anxiety and paranoia with a simple “watch out for those who dare to say/that everything will be okay”.
Album opener, ‘Fever Queen’, is an explicit admission of mistakes made and repeated. It launches the album with a beautiful burst of exasperated noise. “I should know now / that I shouldn’t push you away”, Dominico Palermo stretches each syllable to its limits as if there can be no other way to drive the message home. We hear no promise of resolution – the damage is irreversible.
A little later, we meet another beautiful noise jam intro. ‘A.C.D (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder)’ is a glorious, self-loathing dissection of the end of a relationship, setting casually brutal imagery against compositions that serve as more than a passing nod to Nirvana. ‘Eaten by Worms’ may be an even more blatant homage to mid-Nineties alt-rock, with its jagged guitars, fierce percussion and soft-loud dynamics.
‘Nineteen-Ninety Heaven,’ on the other hand, falls directly into shoegaze territory, with references to Ride evident in the percussion. The composition here is nearly hymnal, and Dominico’s somnolent tone easy to misinterpret as tranquil, until you hear “I’m living in a dream world / life’s a nightmare.”
Like its predecessor, Nothing choose to close this album with the title track. The song ‘Tired of Tomorrow’ is little like the bulk of the album – or indeed anything Nothing have ever done before – exuding both vulnerability and defeatism- qualities heightened exquisitely with the support of a cello and violin. We’d met the same helplessness before when Guilty of Everything left us with the lines “I’ve given up / But you shoot anyway / I’m guilty of everything” ‘Tired of Tomorrow’ is less introspective and speaks to us directly, as sorrowful friends and comrades who are all “stranded in today”. “Rejoice if we are allied”, it says, “our everything Is empty on the inside”.
There’s no romance on this album. Nothing shine a stark white light on reality. As they always have.
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