…AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

Source Tags ‘ Codes

Interscope

Hand drawn images of lovers, soccer balls, parrots, men with crazy mustaches. Colored renderings and vivid photographs of scenic countryside, broken up by the vivid image of a man who has apparently ripped his own heart out. The packaging for …Trail of Dead’s most recent album Source Tags ‘ Codes holds a mirror to their sound: chaotic, busy, confusing, merging the classic with the new, beautiful with the ugly, real with fantasy. The entire headspinning effect is likely as stark as their legendary live shows, revered for their complete anarchy that usually ends in some amount of blood loss and broken bones.

The album cover, the most simplistic of all the images, is the most telling. Simply the band’s name over an amber stonewashed background, the ‘T’ in ‘trail’ is ridiculously ornate, barely definable underneath layers of vine and obscuring emblems. There is where you’ll find the band’s sound: a truly forceful and clear one so far submerged as to appear blurry and sometimes unrecognizable. Badly Drawn Boy also likes this technique, as his The Hour of Bewilderbeast willingly takes his strong singer-songwriter-composer skills and sabotages them with all means of discontinuity and bewildering production.

This clouding tactic dates back to …Trail of Dead’s first self-titled release from 1998, a poorly produced but promising jumble of a mess, with just enough light peeking through the gray to give hope for the future.

Source Tags ‘ Codes is leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors. You still get the grit and layer upon layer of sounds, but it’s much clearer and less muddied. It’s hardly straightforward, however; there are flugelhorns, violas, noisy song intros and vocal distortions, but the padding works to congeal the songs rather than bury them.

Love songs are …Trail of Dead’s biggest assets. Something just happens when they’re writhing around in love that brings out their most memorable melodies and colorful songwriting.

Two such examples are thrown at ya from the start. “It Was There That I Saw You” finds rolling guitars jabbing forcefully ahead while the lyrics recall the good times, dropping to a pensive crawl when talking of the bad times, and returning with some affirming drum rolls for the hopeful conclusion. The incredible “Another Morning Stoner” anchors its expansive sound with an affecting guitar riff, both which pull against each other and bring to life the confusion and anxiety of the song (“I took your hand, led you astray/ you cursed the worlds I longed to save”).

“How Near How Far,” nestled snugly in the middle of the album, is its peak, a beautiful remembrance of past lovers as oil paintings. The refrain of “how near, how far, how lost they are,” doesn’t offer much hope, but the lyrics are breathtakingly graceful: “I’ve rendered every line/ Every contour of a muse’s eye/ Painted in my eyes mind/ On canvases of time.”

When not singing about love, success isn’t as guaranteed. The title track, about a psychologically repressive town and self-definition outside of it, is as strong in purpose, if not execution, as the Deftones’ “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away).” Somehow, it ends up sounding overlong and direction-less, like “Baudelaire” and “Monsoon,” even with the latter’s brilliant imagery of God pissing on the world.

“Why is a song the world for me?” …Trail of Dead asks on “Another Morning Stoner.” There’s no doubt the passion burns strong among these four, and when they’re on, they’re on. But where love songs have reduced other bands to sloppy messes in terms of creativity and composition, the ‘Dead could never cede enough space to honor their muses.