Getting to Know You
Leaping to a major label, Austin's Trail of Dead grows up but doesn't sell out.
The glass flew and bystanders' jaws dropped. In an act of primal punk rage, a band member at South by Southwest had smashed the display case at Austin's new Hard Rock Café to grab Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar. Any year of the last five, smart money would have been on ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead as chief suspects in the desecration. But for once, the infamous stage-smashing quartet was out of town for Austin's biggest musical week. The group finally graduated from SXSW last year, the diploma somewhat water-stained when they threw their bass drum off the ledge of the Red Eyed Fly stage and into the creek below. With the Trail of Dead busy this year ripping apart the East Coast, including two packed houses at NYC's Bowery Ballroom, the L.A. punk bank Icarus Line and its singer Joe Cardamone were left to carry on the smash-and-grab antics at SXSW. Not that the Trail of Dead has given up onstage anarchy. It's that destructive energy that captured the imagination of Europe, after all. But right now the group is all business, touting their stunning new album, Source Tags & Codes. The newfound melodicism of their major-label debut has people recalling Daydream Nation, the art-rock masterpiece that Sonic Youth released in 1988. "It doesn't always happen at the best shows," said Neil Busch (bass, turntable, samples, and third voice) about the band's frequent onstage outbursts. "It's not always something that's necessary. It usually only happens when the crowd isn't bringing the same sort of energy into the show that we are, and we get frustrated." As the trail of believers grows here on the home front, that could mean less Hulk-smash violence onstage. Yet anybody who's seen Jason Reece ferociously swing his guitar like a sword won't believe that any more than they believe the shiny, new Trail of Dead biography. The fine folks at Interscope Records would have us believe that these new American heartthrobs met in the church choir in the rural Texas town of "Planoe," moved to Austin to study anthropology, then named their band after a quaint Mayan pictograph. Tell that to someone who hasn't witnessed the spontaneous combustion of "A Perfect Teenhood," from the Trail of Dead's '99 album Madonna (released on venerable indie label Merge). For the record, it's more like this: Reece and Conrad Keely, who switch off between guitar/vocals and drums, meet in Hawaii, start playing music in Olympia, Wash., then drive to Austin in late 1994, blaring My Bloody Valentine's Loveless the entire way. After a couple of years as a kinda-sloppy two-piece, they enlist Busch and guitarist Kevin Allen, and begin a stratospheric musical ascent. The Trail's dedication to their home scene remains very much visible. On their last couple of American tours the Trail of Dead has taken with them Austin's emerging instrumental rock champions Explosions in the Sky. They patronize the same Austin clubs that they tear to pieces when they're onstage and champion the same Texas bands they wax so faux-holier-than-thou about during their onstage banter. The band's tendency to dish out hogwash, Busch explained, is a result of boredom. "When you're doing 12 interviews a day, there's only so many things you can say in the exact same way over and over again. It's a way to keep ourselves entertained." It might also be a way to sabotage your local press coverage. Not that it matters anymore. Interscope's new Live & Unreleased From Farmclub.com compilation splashes across its cover names like Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Nelly, Staind, and Nickelback, as well as ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. Big-budget press campaign aside, Source Tags & Codes is a masterpiece. The disc's opener, "It Was There That I Saw You," pummels any preconceptions into a thousand white-hot shards. Keely belts out a heartfelt Brit-pop melody and is quickly joined by a barrage of soaring sonic rapture in a marriage that wouldn't be unlike My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields jamming with Blur on "Song 2." The string-laden rainy-day aftermath bumps up against Busch's taut, sneering "Baudelaire" and explodes into Reece's punk-rock "Homage." The album has no single grand mal spasm like "A Perfect Teenhood," but it does have an incomparable holy trinity of songs by dreamtime tunesmith Keely and, most important, that elusive sense of flow that separates the great albums from the merely good ones. Like their not-quite-as-punk patron saints Sonic Youth, the Trail of Dead thrives on three distinct voices and has a penchant for tense, whisper-to-a-scream dynamics and rich, off-kilter guitar tones. "That's one of our biggest assets, having guys who are into so much different stuff and able to do so many different things," said Busch. "It gives us a number of ways to color our sound just the way we want." Another boon is the Interscope budget. "I think our other records might sound more like this if we had the same ability to make them sound just the way we want," Busch suggested. "If we needed a piano tuner, there was one there. If we wanted to add a string section, we could do that too." Hmm, Stevie Ray didn't go around using string sections. Does that make him more punk than the Trail of Dead, or less?
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