Tao Of The Dead By Trail Of Dead

Austinite progcore outfit …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead (alternately abbreviated to AYWKUBTTOD even though it's the same number of syllables or Trail of Dead) are perhaps best known in the collective pop culture consciousness for having one of the longest names of any band to crack the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart. A slightly narrower appraisal of their legacy would be as a band best known for their frenetic live performances and the ritualistic destruction of their instruments. And, after a few more hours of whittling, we arrive at the band who in 2002 released Source Tags & Codes: an album upon which exaltation was, at the time of its release, almost ecumenically showered throughout the indie flowery webzine community.

But perhaps it is more prudent in this discussion to address these three historical lines on the band not as layers of an onion, each bringing us closer to the "truth," but as three interchangeable introductory paragraphs to a review of their latest album, Tao of the Dead, or better yet, three distinct stub articles on the band for some kind of corporate-state-run Wikipedia of the future, in which case, the first proposed stub would probably win out as it's the least historically irrelevant.

So the guitar-smashers with the silly, long name have released a new album of songs and while I could humor Tao of the Dead's purported dialogue with the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, or discuss the graphic novel and extensive album art scheme implemented to promote it, or attempt to contextualize this large scale, multimedia academi-tainment venture somewhere in the group's oeuvre, I think it best to ignore all of that and just focus on… the latest album from the band probably best remembered for providing the song "Caterwaul" for the soundtrack of the 2007 David S. Goyer thiller The Invisible: after all, more people saw that film than bought any single Trail of Dead album. Forgive if I'm being a bit too literal with the idea of historical relevance, but it's important to be rigorous.

As an introduction to this symphony of sorts is "Introduction: Let Us Experiment"–do not let us not!–perhaps the most overturingest overture ever committed to (highly compressed, digitally) recorded music. For the sake of argument, it is incredibly original and in no way encumbered by overture clichés. Actually, in the spirit of Joseph Campbell, let us not even address them as clichés but, rather, as archetypes, which I find more appealing. As a result of this choice, the song genuinely inspires me–as does the "idea" of this band–so I am going to compare it to a great, antediluvian leviathan foundering amidst the spume of a raging blue sea, laboriously prizing apart its mighty jaws as thousands of gallons of luminescent water pour into it along with our meager consciousnesses, or something.

After forty seconds of "Pure Radio Cosplay," another archetype makes an appearance: what Carl Jung referred to as the "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by The Rolling Stones. For this reason, the song does not sound all that different from something by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, but it is a more than acceptable entry into the really-obvious-musical-allusionscore subgenre popularized by such bands as the BJM and Oasis. Also the tense, atonal mood experiment passing for a bridge here wins it back a few points as well as it effects genuine claustrophobic anxiety.

But following this is actually a masterful track–with an actual giant hook or two–that completely puts its predecessors to shame, "Summer of All Dead Souls": even from its opening bars, a fully realized, fleshed-out thing of… I don't know… proggy sludge… splendor(?) and…magisterial… punk… snarl? Yeah, that will do. And this is not to suggest that the track could not have just as easily been released by Queens of the Stone Age at some point between Rated R and Songs for the Deaf, but it is nearly just as good if not better than some of the less incredible songs on those albums.

The inconsequential "Cover the Days Like a Tidal Wave" seems to be something of a sexy poem performed all breathy and adenoidal over a Sonic Youth-esque backing instrumental which eventually explodes into a super brief song snippet which dissolves into the next sort of actual song: grandiose, dramatic military dirge "Fall of the Empire," which of course is cut short before it actually begins to develop into anything, which sucks some of the sincerity out out of it, an injury to which insulted is added by the succeeding tracks: "The Wasteland," a banal bit of elevator rock muzak and "The Spiral Jetty," a 108-second song that runs on a bit too long, partially because attempts of Trail of Dead to emulate the signature cat-guitar sound of Robert Fripp sound more like an unhappy one.

The also silly prog-metal-waltz "Weight of the Sun (Or, the Post-Modern Prometheus)" finds singer Conrad Keeley vacillating between a warbly vibrato and a Maynard James Keenan impression. After an unwelcome "Pure Radio Cosplay (Reprise)," this time around incorporating the actual backing vocals from "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is "Ebb Away," a nice bit of Indie-ish inspirational cheese that, like the competent "Fall of the Empire" goes and ends (read: is ended) before it has a chance to build to anything. What a strange album.

With the onslaught of the pentatonic mayhem that is "Somewhere Over the Double Rainbow," the listener will begin to fear a descent into the aimless dungeon of amateurish prog-rock, and he or she will be correct: nearly six minutes of silly raga with lots of neato sound effects thrown in for good measure. Concluding the album is Trail of Dead's very own "2112" or "Close to the Edge": a 16-minute prog epic, "Strange News From Another Planet." As the band have admitted, this is more a medley of songs than an individual piece of music, so it should probably be reviewed as such, but if they wanted me to do that they shouldn't have cruelly segued the tracks together affording me no escape: the result is a nightmare that I can't go to sleep from.