So, here we have a record from a group that's recently relocated to Brooklyn and uses pre-release interviews as a way to send mash notes to the likes of Dirty Projectors and Yeasayer, bands they bear no sonic similarity to at all. Yeah, big deal-- we could be talking about any number of new jacks with a competent PR team. But this is ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead-- fiercely Austinite and not the kind of people you'd call "joiners." If you're checking in for the first time since 2002, Trail of Dead followed up the monumental Source Tags & Codes with a spending spree of goodwill, beefing with label execs, hectoring reviewers, and having their live shows punctuated with intraband violence. And yes, they made albums, too. While I won't tell how high the perversely enjoyable, self-immolating clusterfuck of Worlds Apart ranked on my 2005 year-end list, I can assure you my enthusiasm for it placed me in the minority. On its follow-up, So Divided, Trail of Dead didn't even bother trying to be provocative. It would've been the sound of a band bottoming out if they hadn't gone on to open for Dethklok in one of the most emasculating turnarounds in rock history.
Having departed Interscope, and now far enough under the radar to avoid the BS of backlash for backlash's sake, Trail of Dead are in their best position in years to resuscitate their image. What stands out on The Century of Self is a sense of confidence in what Trail of Dead have become-- though they're still sorting out their big-top ambitions a bit too prog for radio airplay (but not too prog to necessarily discourage it), gone are the overbearing orchestrations and baffling genre experiments that often served as cloaking devices for either weak songs or a dearth of ideas. It's easy to overstate the ambition thing-- much of this LP approaches the six-minute mark with discernible "movements" and the overreaching religious tirade is given a name like "Isis Unveiled"-- but the architecture is easy to navigate.
"Bells of Creation", for example: First featured on last year's Festival Thyme EP, the song throws in a Who-style midsection of anticipatory drum rolls and key trills but it merely serves as a welcome jolt between the piano drone of the verses. The use of piano, certainly increased, isn't the story or the scapegoat it could be made out to be. Trail leader Conrad Keely's always had a taste for sap, and here he often embraces softer, streamlined arrangements: "Fields of Coal" moves from a feathery waltz-time appropriation of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs to a stein-raising sea shanty, and it ushers in a surprisingly potent run of ballads. It shouldn't work-- Trail of Dead have rarely been at their best when it leads with Keely's voice. But while he strains and slides against the slicker numbers, his voice displays a nice worn-in quality. One of the better songs they've written, "Luna Park" evolves from a Screamadelica comedown to the most naturally epic crescendos of Century with a directness often missing from the rest of the album.
But even when the music takes a lighter touch, Trail of Dead can't quite resist heavy-handedness. *Century'*s second half is bookended by "Insatiable (One)" and "Insatiable (Two)", a couple of "Scarborough Fair" non-starters that are still too close in sequencing to really generate any sort of thematic quality. So in a way, The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them. The naysaying didn't suggest a path towards redemption using a sort of Coldplay/Secret Machines hybrid, yet you'll recall that both of those bands made decent records as recently as 2008, and really, this is the sort of company that Trail of Dead should feel most comfortable around: Keely's now 36, and I'm fairly certain he can't afford to smash a piano every night.
