While their reputation for trashed stages, incendiary live shows and booze-fuelled craziness still precedes them, your reviewer has previously found Texan trio ...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD easy enough to forget on record. OK, bits of "Madonna" were decent enough, but even then it was more of a momentary thing to grab you before you shrugged and thought, yeah right, I've heard this before: I can move on now.
But not this time. "Worlds Apart" is something else altogether. This time, ....Trail Of Dead (newly-slimmed down to a core trio of Kevin Allen, Jason Reece and Conrad Keely after the post-recording departure of bassist Neil Busch) have made an album positively dripping with intensity that's impossible to sweep aside.
Not knowing enough about the band's modus operandi, I can't be sure what the main driving force behind the album's creation is, although a desperate dissatisfaction with their homeland appears to be a major factor. Admittedly, this writer still can't imagine any band making as eloquent a statement about living in post 9/11 America as Wilco did with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", but with "Worlds Apart", Trail Of Dead (Texans, remember) have surely made the angriest and most intense. As we'll discover, it makes for compelling listening.
It opens with a tremulous maelstrom of an orchestral overture ("Ode To Isis"), but this is only a scene setter for the amazing "Will You Smile Again?", which in itself is a microcosm of the album's scope. It kicks off in a molten headrush, spitting rock'n'roll with the venom of a disturbed rattlesnake, before slowing down and morphing into a malevolent bluesy stomp. Its' opening lyrical gambit is: "Close the door and drift away into a sea of uncertainty/ Where all your hopes and dreams have faded out of reach." Gulp. From there, the band keep a tight rein on controlled anger, while drummer Doni Schroeder pounds away like Dave Grohl on a year's supply of steroids and goads the others into heading out the way they came in. It's truly awesome (not a word I like to fall back on as a rule) and afterwards you're absolutely spent.
Quite a start, and most of what follows in its' wake is equally impressive. "Worlds Apart" -the title track - takes a cleaver to the MTV generation and the celebrity world we've all helped to build up and seethes like nothing since The Fatima Mansions' "Popemobile To Paraguay". "Look at those c**ts on MTV, with their cars and cribs and rings and shit, is that what celebrity means?" spits Reece, before concluding "how we laughed as we shovelled the ashes of the twin towers/ Blood and death, we will pay back the debt for this candy store of ours." Weirdly, it's all the more effective for being allied to a jaunty rocker of a tune, but the effect is relentlessly jarring and moving.
This track's not alone in its' frustration, either. The incendiary burlesque of "The Rest Will Follow" (sample lyric: "It is so easy to resign, to ruin this world for everyone") cuts to the very quick of human frailty, while "Caterwaul" is a brash, heatseeking rocker with hissing hi-hat, thunderous drums and push-me, pull-me riffage, and "Classic Arts Showcase" douses apathy in kerosene and pulls out the flamethrower. "Here I am, comfortable in arm's reach of the black remote....let everyone else go," shrugs the lyric before the orchestral aspirations surface once again, taking the track down into a dreamy womb only for the band to pummel their way back out with a Led Zep-style show of strength.
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Indeed, even when ...Trail Of Dead do 'personal' they're no less affecting. By the standards of its' surroundings, "Summer Of '91"is reflective, piano-driven stuff, though the band do punch a hole part way through. Once again, kettle drums and the kitchen sink threaten to muscle in, but the fact the song ends on a positive note ("And if it makes you cry to look ahead, then dry your eyes - it can be done!") is a major boon. The same can't be said of the aching, end-of-the-affair ballad "Let It Dive", though its' reined in guitars and tribal drums work beautifully, as do the deceptively gentle, descending guitars and drum loops of the closing "Last City Of Refuge", where Reece is searching for an escape. "I don't want to know/ I didn't want to see what I saw when I looked in the distance", he sings uncertainly as the band finally bring on the heaviosity.
Perhaps inevitably, bits of it don't work so well. For all its' cauterising guitar overload and Peter Hammill-style theatricality, "The Best" seriously overcooks its' dish, while the - admittedly pretty - violin-led faux-classicism of "To Russia My Homeland" provokes perplexity at best and the big chords, cathedral-size arrangements and female backing vocals of "All White" are ambitious but quite probably a bridge too far for all that.
But perfection isn't attained without dealing with the blemishes, and while you can't describe "Worlds Apart" as 'perfect' by any means, it's an album that's as ambitious as the likes of "Deserter's Songs", "The Soft Bulletin" and (almost) "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" without sacrificing the bloodthirsty urge to rock along the way.
Bit of a result then, you might say.
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