Categories : Hard Rock + Metal, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
By now, the story of …And you will know us by the Trail of Dead’s rapid ascendancy with their still near-perfect 2002 album Source Tags & Codes and subsequent fiery explosion is well known enough that it doesn’t need much attention. The Coles’ Notes version for those not in the know basically boils down to the band releasing a brilliant album that precipitously married explosive punk violence with the delicate beauty of orchestral flourishes and an epic scope. They then followed up their masterpiece with two albums full of bloated, absurd crap.
The noise swirling around the band’s latest album, Century of Self, since its release was that Trail of Dead have finally gotten their shit back together and remembered what briefly made them so thrilling. Century of Self has been hailed as a return to form, in other words. Listening to the album, it’s certainly understandable how people could get that idea, but ultimately the album serves more as a return to making listenable music than as a return to the dizzying heights of Source Tags.
To its credit, Century does start off well. After the atmospheric noise of ‘Giant Causeway,’ Trail of Dead erupt into ‘Far Pavillions.’ The song is a fairly straightforward hardcore romp with Conrad Keely’s nasal whine interplaying with Jason Reece’s gritty shouts overtop of devastating percussion. Halfway through the song, the din dies down to a not-completely-ridiculous choir, a piano and a wall of feedback before the drums thunder back in and the fury starts up again. It’s nothing particularly amazing, but it exudes a feeling of freedom and urgency that have been missing from the band’s music for so long. The sense of danger is back and it’s nice to hear.
‘Isis Unveiled’ follows and keeps things lively with a surging string melody rising above the band’s clamour before the song deconstructs into an extended stomping bridge. It’s the exact kind of grandeur that Trail of Dead fell so flat attempting on their two post-Source Tags albums—World’s Apart and So Divided—but it works here, largely because it isn’t forced. The strings and the six-minute run time serve a purpose other than just the band’s desire to push things to be as huge as possible. Okay, the lyrics are still silly, but this is a band gave themselves a 10 word long name that starts with an ellipses.
Unfortunately, after ‘Isis Unveiled,’ Century of Self loses much of its momentum, falling into piano-driven balladry and more instances of the band piling elements onto a song because they seem to believe bigger equals better. ‘Bells of Creation,’ for example, crawls through its five minutes, offering piano plunks, walls of power chords, immense choruses and a completely unnecessary bridge filled with prog-rock noodling. ‘Pictures of an Only Child’ builds and builds without ever going anywhere. ‘Insatiable One’ and ‘Insatiable Two’ provide only further bloating to an already engorged back end.
A few songs stand out after the strong opening such as downright peppy ‘Fields of Coal’ and ‘Luna Park’—which should be all the proof Trail of Dead need that a stripped down approach is often better than an artificially grand one—but they are strangled their epic-by-numbers neighbours. None of the worst songs on Century of Self come close to some of the lows the band reached at their nadir and in that regard the album is certainly an improvement. It’s no Source Tags & Codes, though, but expecting Trail of Dead to even come close to rivaling that album at this stage is folly. After the years of pap, settling for a decent album that occasionally approaches pretty damn good sure seems like a win, if not a return to form.
