And You Will Know Us By The Tr : Source Tags And Codes

Not difficult third album. Very good indeed...

[I]”When you have rhythm, you want to dance. When you have the blues, you

want to kill”[/I] – Conrad Keeley, Astoria, 2001

They might be unreliable witnesses and inveterate storytellers – there

can be few musicians unbothered enough by their [I]”careers”[/I] to substitute

a proper website biography with an anthropological text on Mayan ritual

– but there’s never been any doubt that …And You Will Know Us By The

Trail Of Dead are a band to trust. Sure, they might be likely to hurl a

bass drum at your head during times of high tension – but at a cultural

moment when the very concept of an [I]”underground”[/I] has somehow become

slightly embarrassing, Keeley, Neil Busch,

Jason Reece and Kevin Allen

sound as if they were born to a life of unfettered noise. [I]”An

electric guitar hanging to my knees /got a couple of verses I can barely

breath”[/I] they sing on the almost-mellow ‘Relative Ways’, a love song

to rock’n’roll, and you can sense how much all this can – should – mean.

Certainly, they could have been forgiven for reining those destructive

urges and playing it safe with their third album: not only is it their

major label debut, it follows the thrilling success of The Strokes and
The White Stripes – neither of whom were a glint in the public eye when

the Trail Of Dead first crashed into view like Thurston Moore’s own

winged monkeys. Accordingly, ‘Source Tags And Codes’ comes with an

albatross-like weight of expectation round its skinny neck – yet

happily, it’s supported by a band who have grown to match it.

Admittedly, within the first three songs the band have already

quadrupled their tune-count – the helter-skelter urgency of ‘It Was

There That I Saw You’, the bloody riff-sacrifice of ‘Another Morning

Stoner’ and the diving board bounce of ‘Baudelaire’ all easily equalling

‘Mistakes And Regrets’ from ‘Madonna’ – yet this album hardly

represents the taming of their curious muse. On the ominous thud of

‘Homage’ or the drum-scuttle of ‘How Near, How Far’, their smash-and-

grab dynamic manages the neat trick of sounding simultaneously untutored

and highly focused, following new twisted threads out from the early-

90s underground labyrinth.

[I]”Do you believe what I say?”[/I] screams Jason Reece repeatedly on ‘Homage’

– and even knowing their ways, you can only say yes. With so much to

play for, so much Butch-And-Sundance, death-or-glory adrenalin, ‘Source

Tags And Codes’ leaves you feeling that the killing can wait for another

day. For now, we dance.

Victoria Segal

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