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And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Festival Thyme
| Austinchronicle |
| Trail of Dead's last album, 2006's So Divided, proved an existential equipoise of blind ambition and pure frustration, documenting the locally based art-rock outfit splitting at its seams. Having since parted ways with Interscope and formed its own label, Richter Scale, a subsidiary of Houston's Justice Records, TOD rings chimes of freedom throughout Festival Thyme, a digitally released preface to the band's sixth LP, due in January. Opener "Bells of Creation (Machete Mix)" slowly builds from a single piano note to a cathartic wall of sound, a newfound streak of optimism underscoring Conrad Keely's lyricism. The celebratory spirit carries over to the title track, a jovial romp of baroque pop, and the more ornate "Inland Sea," balancing progressive movements and post-rock guitar. "The Betrayal of Roger Casement & the Irish Brigade" sounds like a modern instrumental interpretation of Renaissance's Turn of the Cards. (4:50pm, Stage 1.)...full text |
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| Pastemagazine |
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Repeat after me: I will not, under any circumstances, play prog rock. If ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead has any hopes of returning to its glory days, Conrad Keely and Co. should repeat this phrase like a mantra, perhaps even write it a couple hundred times on a chalk board a la Bart Simpson. Sure, after the success of Source Tags and Codes, ...Trail of Dead's experimentation with the prog-oriented side of indie rock seemed like a bold move—a stylistic "fuck you" that rock 'n' roll hadn't seen since Nirvana followed Nevermind with In Utero. And naysayers be damned, ...Trail of Dead got one pretty good record out of the process, the unjustly panned Worlds Apart. But as the band continued down the prog-rock road, it dead ended, releasing the practically unlistenable So Divided, an album impressive only in the fact that it was overloaded with so many bad ideas. It seemed the scrappy band that once recalled Sonic Youth's most explosive works had forgotten how to shut up and rock. ...full text |
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| Pitchforkmedia |
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Just as the earliest recordings of ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead betrayed a great stylistic debt to the tuneful dissonance of Sonic Youth, their 2002 debut for Interscope, Source Tags & Codes, highlighted another important lesson learned from their alt-rock forebears: How to trade up to major-label patronage without losing your cool. Rather than compromise Trail of Dead's punk-prog grandeur, Source Tags' bolstered recording budget allowed them to fully exploit those dichotomies, coaxing the melodic beauty out of the discord while infusing the band's signature crash-endos with apocalyptic heft. But if the early chapters of Trail of Dead's history defied the usual indie-to-major sell-out script, their more recent history has sadly reverted to the usual clichés: First came the dismissal of bassist Neil Busch (the band's unsung George Harrison/John Entwhistle figure) amid rumors of drug abuse, followed by two increasingly overblown albums (2005's Worlds Apart and 2006's So Divided) that steered the band into "November Rain" power-ballad territory and failed to capitalize on Source Tags' momentum. And where Trail of Dead shows used to climax with the orgiastic destruction of their equipment, they were starting to take their frustration out on each other. In the context of this unfortunate decline, the band's fall 2007 tour with "Metalocalypse" cartoon thrashers Dethklok would thus qualify as their Spinal Tap/Puppet Show nadir....full text |
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