After the release of their impressively dark and beautiful debut album,
Guilty of Everything, in early 2014,
Nothing had a stretch of bad luck and close calls that would have broken most bands. Maybe it was resolve picked up during his time in prison, but the band's frontman Domenic Palermo was able to persevere through a serious mugging that left him in the hospital, the ridiculous label shenanigans that returned the group to Relapse, and an ugly twitter scandal that severely tested a friendship between bandmates, to deliver the band's second album,
Tired of Tomorrow, in May of 2016. On it, the band sticks closely to the shoegaze sound of
Guilty, while adding Mellotrons, pianos, and even more '90s (grunge,
Nirvana) influence. Palermo and Brandon Setta construct a huge wall of guitars on most of the songs, but with less heavy metal and more dream pop this time around. The riffs swirl like smoke, rather than pummel, and the overall feel of the album is lighter and far less intense. Musically, anyways, since the lyrics and melodies are still somewhere far south of melancholy. Unfortunately, the lack of dramatic shifts in dynamics, the powerful metal crunch, and the sweetening of many of the songs with strings and keys help to lessen the impact of the record.
Guilty was the sound of a band digging itself out of a deep hole, creating sound and songs that sounded like a struggle between life and death. The tightly coiled energy and furious restraint that made it so vital is mostly missing on
Tired of Tomorrow. The songs don't have the same drive and desperate feel, the sound is dissipated where it should be punchy, bland where it should be jagged, and smoothed out to the point where it just washes over the listener when it should be dragging them into battle. It's not a total loss, since Palermo still comes up with a few choice moments of shoegaze beauty, like on the soaring "ACD (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder)," and they do go back to the metal well occasionally with varying results. The main problem with the album is that the songs aren't very compelling and the sound isn't very distinctive, and in an age when shoegaze groups are popping up like mushrooms in a dark forest, a band needs more than a pleasing sound and some nice melodies to make anyone care or actually feel anything while listening to your records.
Nothing had every element in place to make
Guilty of Everything very close to brilliant, a modern shoegaze/noise rock classic; on
Tired of Tomorrow, they seem to have lost their way and have made something quite standard issue and disappointing. [
Tired of Tomorrow was also released on LP.] ~ Tim Sendra