TRAGIK – Faith Healer

Rock Company 2020

TRAGIK –
Faith Heale

Accruing the heft and strength required for further motion, seekers of hard-rock drama bring on drastic doctoring to the operating table.

If, artwork-wise, “Faith Healer” has torn the recent pattern of scantily-clad ladies adorning this ensemble’s albums, it’s also gained the group a certain aural muscularity – the flaming quality so fitting to mark their 15th anniversary. Phil Vincent doesn’t loosen his firm grip on vocal chords and an array of instruments here, no, yet there’s a harder edge to TRAGIK now, akin to that of his other projects such as LEGION whose latest work was issued at the same time as the cuts gathered here. But there’s also the melodic continuity of AOR approach which "Tainted" outlined a few years ago.

So it’s only logical to open the follow-up record with “Back On The Road” and let the guitars wall crumble and fall before vigorous vocals and frayed riffs take over and whip the listener into a frenzy, whereas “Faith” undermines its own bombast by adding sharpness and Vince O’Regan’s sweet six-string frills to the attack. Vincent handles guitars himself on “Who Am I?” and “Don’t Know What To Believe” that are too serious and personal for passing the throbbing veins of these piano-rippled pieces – the former a heavy number, the latter a dancefloor fodder, both highly contagious – to somebody else. Even the histrionic heroics of the bluesy “Over & Over” won’t get in the way of the album’s molten determination.

Yet while “Do It Again” packs a solid, solemn, sonic punch – thanks to Damian D’Ercole’s bass and Dirk Phillips’ drums – and marries contemporary drive to classic organ grind, it’s the irresistibly simple refrain of “Robot Love” that should lodge itself in one’s lobes to haunt a psyche when the groove of life is lost. If it can’t heal you, nothing can.

****1/2

March 31, 2021