...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - The Century of Self (Richter Scale)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
This just in - new Trail of Dead album in 'not bitterly disappointing' shocker..! Gordon Brown hails "courageous" return to form... Barack Obama prepares for 5pm press conference... Michael Jackson announces Texan rockers as support for O2 dates...
Back at the turn of the millennium, a Texan art rock collective with a mouthful of a band name called ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead made a couple of wonderful records - their second, and their third. Then they disappeared. Not off the face of the earth, just, up their own backsides - in full public view. Thing was, those first two records were and are so special that people have retained an excitement for each and every new note they've played since - regardless of whether it turned out to be any good or not, which it largely was not. Many people have been disappointed, consistently, to the extent that I for one wasn't particularly looking forward to pressing play on this bad boy. 'Hey, they've already made a classic - that's more than most people manage', I thought. 'Let's just give Source Tags... another listen, and forget everything post 2000.'
Yet I, sir, as many will tell you, am a tw*t. This is pretty much exactly what they should have done at this 'out on a limb' point in their career - they've not gone back exactly to the sound of Source Tags and Codes, instead what they've done is gotten so good at all the huge, 16 bar length melodies and piano interludes that you can now no longer escape the fact that they're actually really rather good at them, and combined that well honed skill with their once though lost ability to rock the f**k out like a particularly punishing heavy metal band. It's as if the last two records were parts of an overarching, fiendish master plan, the culmination of which is The Century of Self.
Don't get me wrong though - even if they were part of a well plotted scheme, those last two albums were pretty gash. This conclusively isn't, and it's in large part down to having a killer tune or five as opposed to just operatic, exploratory patches every which way you turn. One of these is 'Isis Unveiled',and whilst I hope the title is some kind of dig at the consistently disappointing, miserable sport-metallers Isis, it probably isn't. What it is, is a kind of pummelling, almost folk-y jig. Yet whereas the Trail of Dead of the recent past would have taken the jig part of this as the most important bit, here, they realise that they do rocking out better than they do anything else, and manage to achieve the 'interesting musical thing' at the same time as the 'very loud musical thing'. Why it didn't occur to them over the past few records, I don't know.
Is that Ian Macakye singing on 'Far Pavillions'? Of course it's bloody not, but the fact that you can even make the comparison to one of the most emotive vocalists of recent times shows you that Trail of Dead give a shit about this album in a way that hasn't been apparent on their last two outings. They love having been written off. They're thriving on it.
Songs like 'Halycon Days' go curiously silent in the middle, but just when you think an unending prog freak out is on the cards to fill the gap, they start the song again. With another really catchy melody. They're using every catchy melody that wasn't on present on the last pair of LPs, and they're playing them in a row. It's exhilarating. It's like Husker Du does Springsteen, without sounding anything like The Hold Steady, and is all the more wonderful for it. They're paying attention to their contemporaries, to fashions, but twisting them to play to their strengths - 'Fields of Coal' is what would happen if 2009's own renaissance man, The Boss, fronted 2009's best band, Animal Collective. It's completely over the top but absolutely f**king marvellous.
But enough of the riffs, the choruses, the four four rhythms (of which there are, refreshingly, loads!), you liked the pompous stuff? Well chill out, there's still a bit of it - there are still songs called things (precisely) like 'Bells of Creation' ("I heard the voice of God coming in the music, and I felt like Satan!"), and songs like 'Bells of Creation' are still really quite silly when you think about them long and hard enough. I'm just trying to say they're better at this whole thing now. All of it. N, they're Not as good as they were on Source Tags..., but Jesus, you let the Beatles make another record after Revolver, didn't you? Cut 'em some slack, puh-lease.
The first half's pretty perfect, truth told. The second half begins in something of an inevitable slump, 'Luna Park' and 'Pictures of an Only Child' forming something of a hardly-complimentary pairing, both too leaden and lacking in subtlety to really work next to each other. The moments where the tunes are less at the forefront are also the ones where The Century of Self sounds decidedly less assured. 'Insatiable One' follows a similar path but reads the map a little more closely in its quest towards success, and the pace is invigoratingly picked up a bit for the aptly titled 'Ascending' - by the point of which you're witnessing Trail of Dead once again in 'the zone', doing that pissed off choir of Win Butlers thing again, poised, with two tracks left, to end the record on a high.
Which they do - 'An August Theme' is less than a minute of synth strings that flows nicely in to the closer, and to be fair to them, what with spoiling us with rocking out for quite so much of Century of Self, they earn the piano stretch out of 'Insatiable Two' (which doesn't really bear that much of a resemblance to 'Insatiable One' in all honesty), and you're happy to go with them on it. As hinted at before, they're now quite good at being pompous and brutal at once. And I can't think of many bands who I can say that about.
It's an encouraging sign that as they're getting older, they're deciding to get louder again - but this isn't a convoluted Manic Street Preachers 'Masses Against The Classes' type thing. It sounds entirely sincere, not calculated, but like a natural urge that's been submitted to. It's still complicated enough for it to be interesting. But the record's complications don't define the band, not any more. The songs do. The absolutely bloody killer rock songs.
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