Lost Songs
Trail of Dead's latest album replaces textural trickery and extended set pieces with anxious energy, pure volume, and in-the-room immediacy. It's almost as if, instead of releasing a 10th-anniversary edition of Source Tags and Codes, the band opted to create something new using the same schematics.
Austin’s …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead is a prog-punk band in the truest sense: For the past 14 years, the group’s music has blurred the line between anthemic and indulgent, mixing punk’s distorted anarchy with prog’s meandering majesty. The problem has been getting the formula right.
It ain’t subtle – “A mother screams, a child answers/Her flesh is ripped apart and dashed upon the flagstones” – but then none of ‘Lost Songs’ is.
Good on these guys for still doing it, even if "these guys" is really only Conrad Keely, Jason Reece and whomever they've got filling in the blanks nowadays.
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Coming with an overtly political manifesto, Trail of Dead’s eighth studio album Lost Songs fittingly stands as their most direct statement in some time, perhaps ever. There’s little in the way of grandiose song movements or recurrent themes that usually give texture and scope to the Texan veterans' output. Instead, Lost Songs is a straight-up, blistering ride of towering riffage, pummelling percussion and some thrilling, ‘lose yourself’ vocals.
In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a puppet to a media mogul whose every move is controlled by powers above; in Liar Liar, he finds himself unable to lie, and in Yes Man Carrey can’t say “no.”
[xrr rating=3.75/5]…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead are hard to pigeonhole.
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Lost Songs review: Back to basics.