For all their personnel shuffles, label changes, and changes in stylistic direction, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead's signature songs have stuck to the same formula: they begin with a noisy surge that builds until it explodes and dissolves, then embers slowly reignite the flames. It's uncanny how the band's career has followed the same trajectory. After spending their first three albums deftly balancing artistry and aggression, their next two Interscope releases over-reached for rock-operatic opulence and crashed hard. But with 2009's transitory The Century of Self, the band started to replenish its intensity. By 2010's The Tao of the Dead, there were more encouraging reminders of what this band does best: play punk rock with the grandiose ambition of prog, rather than attempting the latter outright.
But where even Tao couldn't resist signing off with a 16-minute multi-sectional opus, Lost Songs matches its predecessor's brisk momentum without devoting an entire side of vinyl to a single track. It's almost as if, instead of releasing a 10th-anniversary edition of 2002's Source Tags and Codes (their most celebrated album, though I think 1999's Madonna is every bit its equal), Trail of Dead opted to create something new using the same schematics. Lead-off track "Open Doors" even echoes the relentless, in-the-red rumble of Source Tags' introductory salvo "It Was There That I Saw You"; it's also the one song here that breaches the five-minute mark, setting the tone for what is arguably Trail of Dead's leanest album to date.
This stripped-down approach is as much a conceptual device as the band's most ornate efforts: Lost Songs is reportedly Trail of Dead's response to what they see as a culture of passivity endemic to contemporary indie rock and, accordingly, they've dedicated the album to imprisoned performance-art punks Pussy Riot. The concept extends to the visual: the group's famously elaborate and colorful artwork is replaced here by a rough black-and-white sketch redolent of an old-school hardcore flyer.
Trail of Dead's attempts at cultural critique have backfired in the past-- the title track to 2005's Worlds Apart complained of MTV pop-punk posers while sounding not unlike a Blink-182 song itself. But Lost Songs is a successful pairing of intent and execution. Jason Reece's "Catatonic" wages its war on apathy with a frenzied, Fugazi-worthy charge, its hypnotic riff standing in for a smartphone-numbed generation about to be jolted awake; "Pinhole Cameras" and "Bright Young Things" bulk up their Grant Hart-moulded power-pop melodies till they sound like the Hüsker Düde. At its best, Lost Songs' take on post-hardcore imagines an alternate history where indie rock's first-wave originators got to rule the modern-rock radio landscape of the 1990s, rather than just serve as an increasingly diluted influence upon it.
Lost Songs' mission is muddied somewhat by a weighty mid-album stretch, as Trail of Dead sacrifice speed and scrappiness for heavy bluster on "A Place to Rest" and "Flower Card Games" (the latter of which-- like So Divided's "Naked Sun" before it-- confirms that this band becomes less interesting the bluesier they get). But Lost Songs in turn reminds us that Trail of Dead excel at more than just apocalyptic, drum-set-toppling, thrash-and-burn. Its most resonant track, "Awestruck", is also its most atypically pretty, a close cousin to Source Tags' "Relative Ways" that buttresses its kaleidoscope-eyed melody with layers of gleaming guitars. But even here, the sense of reverie is undercut by a call to action: "Get awestruck," Conrad Keely demands, yearning for a time when a band could be your life, not just a lifestyle accessory. With this album, we have reason to heed his advice. Though Lost Songs' namesake track serves as an attack on meaningless wallpaper indie, it's no accident that the title also presents the record as an artifact-- and a golden opportunity to rediscover a band that had to get a little lost in order to find itself again.
