It’s an issue when a genre becomes so hung up on its classics and predecessors that it curses itself to forever repeat and emulate certain moments and ideas, in subtly different ways each time. This is an issue I never thought would come up with mathcore, a genre so built around the concept of unpredictable sudden changes and complex music that for any bands to be recognizably similar seemed just unlikely. The thing is that throughout A Partial Dialogue between Ghost and Priest, A Textbook Tragedy’s debut LP, so much of it seems at least vaguely familiar to me that I have trouble disconnecting it from its influences and predecessors, I can’t view as standing on its own unconnected from its context in the genre.
Not that that’s a bad thing at all, because while A Textbook tragedy have most obviously listened to a lot of Calculating Infinity and other such mathcore classics, they do differ from the stock in that their grasp on building melody and jazzy interludes into their music surpasses the majority of their peers. Dance Nils Dance, for example, at one point breaks into what could be lightly described as some simple, improvisational, cool jazz that provides some respite from the throat tearing shrieks, screams and chaotic instrumentation. The same can be said for the interlude track “Surgeons at Dawn” with its whispered vocals and ominous, repetitive ambience (that reminds me of Me And Him Call It Us ambient tracks) illustrating a stark contrast between A Textbook Tragedy’s two approaches to song writing.
For the most part this juxtaposition of chaotic, scatter-brained hardcore with jazzy noodling and melodic build ups forms the core of their sound. The exception is “Flatlining on Foreign Soil”, being the only track on here that lacks any subtlety or musical concept other than full frontal spastic aggression, it clocks in at 17 seconds and consists solely of chaotic instrumentation and hysterically high-pitched screaming that sounds like some nightmarish abattoir situation, and is one of the most enjoyable slices of spazz-grind I’ve had the pleasure to experience.
But for a band that is first and foremost a mathcore band they really aren’t even that adept at writing solid mathcore transitions. Each track has its moments but more importantly the transitions they attempt are nowhere near as controlled or subtle as Botch or Dillinger, instead a lot of it comes off as messy and amateur, such as in the aforementioned interlude track where the atmosphere they create is frankly ruined by messy blast beats and generic riffing. And that is a reasonable problem in a genre like mathcore, which relies on musicians being able to pull off almost instant, complex changes and transition into new moments seamlessly as if they had been playing this moment all their lives, making it somewhat forgivable that the band does occasionally fall into aping Dillinger.
