...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
Worlds Apart
(Interscope Records)
Within the first few minutes of Worlds Apart, indie hardcore group ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead clearly establishes the theatrical, ambitious and bombastic nature of their latest effort.
The instruments and choral arrangements race from suspenseful to epic, develop from quiet to roaring and finally settle on soft and plaintive a couple minutes into track two, \Will You Smile Again For Me.""
Fans of Trail Of Dead will be puzzled when vocalist Conrad Keely dreamily begins with the lyrics ""Close the door, and drift away"" to a slow, soft whirlwind of musical noises.
The soft clarity of his voice is something new, as are many aspects of Worlds Apart.
Trail Of Dead, whose name is steeped in 10th-century Mayan ritual, is not your average band. They certainly would not make just an ordinary follow-up to its last album, 2002's masterpiece Source Tags & Codes.
Worlds Apart exposes a more consistently gorgeous and soft side to the Austin trio, who seem determined to forever escape the doldrums of predictability.
It becomes evident, especially through tracks such as ""The Rest Will Follow,"" that Trail Of Dead has created the indie rock equivalent of Green Day's opus American Idiot: a multi-faceted rock opera filled with reflection and analyzation.
Worlds Apart is certainly more subtle and less clearly interpretable than American Idiot, but ultimately they seem to be getting at similar points.
One of the album's true quirks is ""To Russia, My Homeland,"" a minute-long violin waltz that leads into the final stretch of the album. It does not really fit with the rest of the album, but by the time it rolls around, you are hardly concerned with practical conventions of music anymore.
The song serves as a light breather for the emotional intensity of what follows; ""The Best"" ends with a woman's blood-curdling cry while a reprise of the title track is heard faintly underneath. As the lyric resurfaces and we're again told how ""In death we will repay the debt of this candy store of ours,"" the album feels as if it is over, as if it has all been the detailed account of some deranged sort of a war that has just been lost.
Then comes an epilogue, the aptly titled ""Lost City Of Refuge."" With its repeated assurance of ""we're swept away, but not lost,"" the song manages to capture the underlying spirit of Worlds Apart.
At the same time, it sounds slightly removed from the rest of the album in the way that ""A Day In The Life"" feels on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-it is a bookend that somehow stands apart from the preceding tracks.
To compare Trail of Dead to anything is somewhat futile though; they are truly their own experience, a fantastically strange band which continues to keep us on our toes.
