ALBUM REVIEW: …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Tao of the Dead

(Richter Scale / Superball 2011)
Review by Michael Bird
                                            
2/5

Seven albums in, you could forgive …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead a little indulgence (and expect some, if you’re familiar with the band). You could also expect a continuation of the somewhat stripped down, direct style the band returned to on their last LP Century of Self after a few poorly received, fairly overwrought albums. Tao of the Dead delivers on both counts, but it’s difficult to know where to file the album in relation to other …Trail of Dead releases. 

As far as indulgence goes, the two-part album (with each part in a specified key) is thematically based around a steampunk comic world created by singer/guitarist Conrad Keely, and the special edition version of the album comes with some extra music and a graphic novel to boot. The second part of Tao of the Dead is the fifteen minute ‘Strange News From Another Planet’, which is split into five ‘movements’ and littered with vocal samples and spaced-out ambient sections. So yes, there is plenty of indulgence from the Texas four-piece, but at least it’s mostly just padding to the music this time around, and the songs themselves don’t suffer too much. What dragged the last few albums before Century of Self down was over the top instrumentation and ideas bigger than the band could commit to tape. Stripping back to a four piece and spending only ten days in the studio did prevent too much musical bombast from entering into the equation, but where does that leave the songs themselves?

Unfortunately, one thing …Trail of Dead have lost over the last few years is urgency, and without it a lot of the songs on Tao of the Dead just chug along and disappear without making much of an impact. Token instrumental opener ‘Introduction: Let Us Experiment’ starts the album off with a bang of sorts, but it’s nothing new for the band, who deployed the exact same sonic tricks on the instrumental opener to Century of Self. From there it’s the same rolling toms and middling guitars that have become …Trail of Dead’s meat and potatoes, and there just isn’t much interesting enough to warrant repeat listens. ‘Pure Radio Cosplay’ has a decent keyboard hook, but the trouble is it’s the same keyboard hook used in the first track and again later in the wholly unnecessary ‘Pure Radio Cosplay (Reprise)’. The Jason Reece-sung ‘Ebb Away’ is a welcome break from a run of songs that just sound too alike to be thoroughly enjoyable, with a slower tempo and some space in the production. For all the elements the band stripped away, the instruments that remain crowd each other in almost every track, exhausting the ear.

The multi-part second section to the album (switching from the key of D to the key of F, for those who are interested) is, again, unremarkable. It sounds more like sketches that could have become a few decent songs that have been thrown together for the sake of having a long track with ‘movements’. That the whole of Tao of the Dead was recorded in so short a time suggests that the multi-part song is there more as a gimmick than a creative work, and it doesn’t sound cohesive enough or contain enough build and movement to be memorable. 

Worlds Apart had its faults, but ‘Will You Smile Again?’ is among the best tracks …Trail of Dead have put out. So Divided was equally poor, but the bands cover of ‘Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory’ is gorgeous. Tao of the Dead is a miscued attempt to strip the sound back to something that resembles the bands early successes, but there are no standout tracks to save the album from being wholly forgettable.