| Austin
Chronicle - No Date by Greg Beets | |
Like
lettuce wrapped around a steaming egg roll, Austin's Trail of Dead revels in the
yin-yang of discordant extremes. Their debut gushes forth in a manic pattern of
rising and falling, whispers coupled with screams, and quiet, unassuming
beginnings followed by torturous, hyper-climactic endings. The real pleasure for
the listener is trying to figure out how they're going to get back down from
whatever feedback-blistered fix they've willfully thrown themselves into. Traces of Sonic Youth, Nice Strong Arm, and My Bloody Valentine dot Trail of Dead's warbled cacophony, but the nice, thick snare adds a bit of home-fried punk backbone to the stew. Amid this wall of noise, the sweetly desperate "Half of What" could actually be a parallel universe hit single on account of its urgent, pulse-raising backbeat. All eight songs seem to be thematically tied together in loose form by the triumph of celebrity over humanity as a not-so-subtle form of fascism. However, Trail of Dead's musical take on this concept is a lot more Euro-cinematic and ambiguous than Pete Townshend's or Roger Waters'. No matter how you slice it, this music resonates with the sound of 1000 screaming car alarms begging you to prick up your ears in a world where anything less isn't even worthy of a passing glance. Rating: *** 1/2 | |
