In the four years since the release of their monumental Source Tags and Codes, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead have suffered both indie backlash and mainstream indifference. On their follow-up to Source Tags, 2004's rightfully panned Worlds Apart, the unflinching confidence and frenetic energy that made the band's previous albums so convincing suddenly disappeared, leaving little more than a batch of subpar radio-ready modern rock songs. Worlds Apart's slick, overcompressed sound brought forth all the cries of "sellout" that Source Tags had effectively stifled.
As was the case with its predecessor, the aesthetic faux-pas on So Divided can be cringe-inducing. It's not pretty. But there's a much bigger problem at hand: Trail of Dead don't even sound like a rock band any more. So Divided is even more elaborately orchestrated and structured than Source Tags and Codes, but its complexity seems inorganic and clumsy, revealing the weakness of the source material rather than elevating and enhancing it. There's certainly nothing wrong with forgoing traditional rock instrumentation in favor of lavish arrangements and studio trickery, but the bells and whistles here don't even begin to fill the void created by a complete dissipation of the group's energy. Even when the dizzyingly disparate pieces of the album do fall into place, it seems like the work of some external hand; the band achieves crystalline structural vistas, but it's never quite clear how they got there, or why.
Indeed, the least sophisticated parts of So Divided are often its most memorable. Opener "Stand in Silence" could be easily written off as mallpunk, but at the very least it sounds forceful and passionate. It would be easy to accuse the band of pandering to radio and MTV, but even their commercial instincts seen to be faltering here, as punchy two-minute pop songs are needlessly stretched into disjointed epics. This kind of misdirection plagues So Divided: "Naked Sun" begins as an embarrassing "Bad to the Bone" pastiche and segues incongruously into yet another two-minute orchestral swell, and closer "Sunken Dreams" can't seem to figure out whether it's vintage Peter Gabriel or a late-90s cell phone commercial.
There are a few moments when such disunity works to the band's advantage. The percussion-heavy "Wasted State of Mind" buzzes and shakes nervously through a handful of memorable hooks. A cover of Guided by Voices' "The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory" fulfills the imaginary grandeur of Robert Pollard's original, but lands a bit on the syrupy side. The opening bars of "Life" effectively incorporate the album's sonic fragmentation into the fabric of the song itself, but it quickly separates out into a subpar tune and unnecessary embellishment.
This kind of separation prevents So Divided from building any momentum over its deceptively brief 46 minutes. While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid. Throughout the last two Trail of Dead albums, singer Conrad Keely has obsessed over themes of distance and division. Whether it's a matter of unfortunate irony or frustrated artistic self-awareness, these are the very issues preventing the band from making good records. For the time being, Trail of Dead can't even seem to capture the fervor of their own ambivalence.
