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Austinist CD Review: Trail of Dead - So Divided
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
So Divided
Self-indulgence has always been central to the Trail of Dead's MO. Early albums whooshed by in a maelstrom of guitar noise, complex time changes, and punk-derived sneering. Who would bother constructing such intricate cacophony—or naming themselves a ten-word quote from a Mayan war chant— without a definitive musical axe to grind?
Co-bandleaders Conrad Keely and Jason Reece, working-class kids with poetic inclinations, wrote tight, prog-inflected punk songs that might have been 6 min long but felt like three. The band built its cred on a series of increasingly baroque, prog-leaning albums—the distance between their eponymous debut and 2005’s Worlds Apart is the distance between CBGBs and Royal Albert Hall—but, even on the much-maligned Worlds, they always left room for killer hooks and inventive arrangements. The records were alive. They breathed.
Sadly, Trail of Dead’s 5th long-player catches the band slipping further into the mid-70s pomposity Worlds Apart only hinted at—a bastard child of ELO and Yes, So Divided finds the group upping the glossiness of the former and the pretension of the latter but lacking the hooks of either. Pile up enough orchestration to distract from limp songwriting and before long your album starts sounding like a herd of beached whales rolling around on grand pianos.
Despite some nice studio gilding, opener “Stand In Silence” can best be described as Phil Collins ghostwriting for Pearl jam. “Wasted State Of Mind” piles on tablas, pianos, and accordions, resulting in a melody mostly obscured in the too-busy mix. The less said about “Naked Sun,” the better.
One can only wonder why these tracks were chosen to open the album—the rest of the album actually fares much better. “So Divided” rides a slow-rolling, stoned riff into a rollicking middle passage that hearkens back to the most indelible moments on their 2002 masterwork Source Tags And Codes, coolly passionate, calm and explosive at once, Keely’s harrowing screams of “I’ll put you out of your misery” anchoring the emotional maelstrom. “Life,” a portentously titled paean to thirty-something dread, weaves spidery minor-key pianos and processed marimbas around an assertive hi-hat toward a beautiful outro sung by Brothers & Sisters. Elsewhere, “Eight Day Hell” bounces along on such an aggressively sunny pop progression it winds up being just sort of over-the-top and creepy, in a good way. “Sunken Dreams” mashes up Disintegration-era Cure, the Bee Gees, and beat poetry into an appallingly discordant froth, yet manages to impress by virtue of its sheer audacity.
Trail of Dead’s frustration with the reception of Worlds Apart shines through in spades on Divided, but they seem to have gone in the wrong direction, shutting themselves up in the studio Phantom of the Opera-style with their French horns and candelabras instead of taking a critical eye to what works on their albums and what doesn’t. There are many fine moments, but as a whole So Divided lurches where it should glide, wheezes where it should sigh, and piles on the tres leches where it should have just ordered a nice espresso. Ironically, the project began as a stopgap EP to keep the band from splitting up after Worlds Apart’s disappointing sales. A little judicious editing could in fact have turned this flabby thing into a monster of an EP, or even just a tighter LP. Oh well.
