Remember all the bad dreams are not far from reality

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Worlds Apart

I really enjoyed the first couple …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead albums. As ballistic and scattered as they were, they managed to find a certain beauty in all that chaos, and I respect that. With songs about Baudelaire and all the medieval trappings in their artwork, they left little doubt to their pretentiousness, but it was so loud and manic that hardly mattered.

Then along came Worlds Apart. I suppose the problem with the album is not so much its grade school ‘I’m such a suffering artiste’ lyrics as the emphasis placed on them by the change in musical style. In short, Trail of Dead went all prog, and not well. The chorale, piano, and violins overture “Ode to Isis” sounding like a Howard Shore soundtrack that opens the album is not egregious, and while the woman’s scream that separates it from the guitar maelstrom that announces the first proper song, “Will You Smile Again?” is a bit much, warning bells don’t really start ringing until the end of that song. “Will You Smile Again?” seems like a good announcement of a new direction. It’s certainly loud and massive, but slowly paced, and broken into sections that rhythmically transform into a march, then incrementally into all out war.

Okay. We’re still good. Then the song ends and a bunch of children cheer and Conrad Keely shouts ‘HEY! FUCK YOU!’ Oh guys no. Not inane between-song skits about how cool and tough you are. The song, of course, is about how everyone on MTV is a sellout and America is looking bad to the rest of the world. Oh, and then “Summer of ‘91″ which smacks of ‘Okay, now let’s slow things down a moment’ with its piano part and Keely struggling with the melody. The album is altogether a lot slower than their prior work, which is fine in theory, but there is a sense of them being so totally caught up with themselves that really grates. It feels like the most overblown mallcore prog imaginable. It has some fine moments – “Caterwaul” has a great, swaying intensity and is layered enough to keep the vocals from becoming central. Keely is not a good singer, but screaming suits him well. From there, it just gains momentum in its decline and it is just plain terrible by the end. You know what would have been better than their song “The Best”? If they’d covered that song from The Karate Kid. They could even keep this stupid fucking sample of someone crying at the end of the song.

Worlds Apart is not terrible overall, it’s just not all that good. It’s boilerplate. It’s a bowl of farina with a lukewarm cup of Coors.

55% => **1/2

~ by jshopa on May 30, 2008.