IN REVIEW: ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - "XI: Bleed Here Now"

 

You can never accuse ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead of chasing trends. Over their now quarter century-plus career the group, spearheaded from the start by childhood friends Conrad Keely and Jason Reece, have explored noise punk, art rock, post-hardcore, prog and a host of other genres, flitting between them on a whim and producing whatever kind of racket suits their insatiable appetites for creation. By times, their sound has lined up with the tastemakers, most famously as raucous acts like At the Drive-In and Alexisonfire were rising to prominence; Trail of Dead's commercial and critical peak coincided with this time period, and there's not much argument against 2002's Source Tags & Codes being their best loved, most popular release.

The thing is, that was twenty years ago, and Trail of Dead have become a completely different band over that vast span of time; only Keely and Reece remain from the "classic" lineup, and the band has seen a dozen different members enter and/or exit since that album cycle. They've also bounced around record labels and flirted with various levels of exposure over the last twenty years, but a quick summarization would classify Trail of Dead in 2022 as a fringe prog-rock band with a small but loving fan base.

Whereas many bands would celebrate the 20th anniversary of their biggest hit with a reissue, celebratory tour and/or new music that draws inspiration from the work in question, Trail of Dead have opted for something else entirely; Bleed Here Now, their eleventh record (using quadrophonic production, which is a neat selling point), marks their first double album (at 75 minutes, it trumps their next longest by over twenty minutes). This won't come as a major shock to anyone who's paid attention to the band after they struck it big and faded back into the background, but it also shouldn't come as a major shock to learn that Bleed Here Now did not need to be as gargantuan an effort as it became.

For starters, it's slow to get its footing; the first four minutes consist of Our Epic Attempts, which acts as an introduction and features a prologue of sorts to a song that comes later, and the 90 second Long Distance Hell, which isn't much more than an interlude track. The first song proper, Field Song, kicks off a trio of songs that offer much of the melodic and muscular gifts fans have grown accustomed to; Field Song is a straightforward tune that packs a strong hook and a spacey outro, Penny Candle trades in the tense and arpeggio-assisted majesty that's been a hallmark of the band since the beginning, and No Confidence (which reprises the lyric from the intro) goes for some psychedelic swagger and pummeling stoner rock riffage.

The album's next section casts a wider net, but ends up more than a little scattershot; there's a 38 second orchestral interlude (String Theme), an 82 second hardcore rager (Kill Everyone), a nuanced acoustic strummer (Growing Divide, featuring a co-vocal by Spoon's Britt Daniel), 52 seconds of droning guitar and warped noises (Pigments), a jammy psych-rock epic that turns a bit interstellar (Golden Sail) and a short, instrumental synth interlude that's there to segué into the next song (A Life Less Melancholy). These six tracks take up over thirteen minutes of the running time, and reading that paragraph again will give you an idea of just how many ideas they're throwing at you in short succession.

At this point, we find out what that two minute segué was leading to; Taken By the Hand, the obvious intended centerpiece of the record, sprawls out into full prog. Incorporating jazzy drumming, Floydian keys and multiple switches in feel and mood, at eleven minutes and change it breaks the record for their longest single song by about three minutes (I say single song because Strange News From Another Planet and Tao of the Dead Part III are longer than this but are technically five song suites). This song doesn't need to go this big or this long, though; while I can appreciate the stretching out and jamming, it ends up being far more notable for how much time it consumes than what it does with the time.

A more concise, much better sprawl follows with Contra Mundum, a song with just as much inventiveness and more heart without the fussy tempo shifts, and it's over in a more palatable five minutes. Another interlude follows, then another effective five minute song in Water Tower; featuring a lilting melody and a strong chorus, this one finds Trail of Dead firmly in their comfort zone. We're then treated to yet another meandering interlude before Protest Streets, a simmering mid-tempo stomp that finds a groove and stubbornly stays in it for the majority of the song's six minutes; it does build in intensity and threatens to bubble over, but it ultimately keeps its hands inside the ride for the duration, the song fading out in its final minute and giving way to an acoustic outro.

If you had your money on another interlude here, give yourself a co-producer credit; The Widening of Gyre adds more weird noises to the album before bleeding into another mid-tempo ballad. Millennium Actress features a co-vocal by Amanda Palmer, floats along in a similar fashion to Water Tower, and draws into focus one of my favourite nitpicks; at this point in the album, we've gone about 36 minutes (or, if you love math like I do, almost half the album's total length) and stayed in this mid-tempo, low energy territory. It's not totally egregious, as there is at least some variety across the tracks, but I found myself sorely missing some of that good old unbridled fury Trail of Dead used to pepper their track lists with.

The energy does come up somewhat with Salt in Your Eyes, a brief but fun number that starts with some whimsical Beatles-like rhythms and singalongs and finishes with a frantic cacophony the band members yelling about potatoes (it's fine, I can just go with it). This is followed by English Magic, a synth and string-laced acoustic ballad that acts as the album's dénouement as the only remaining track after this is Calm As the Valley, a warped and choral epilogue that once again reprises the lyric from Our Epic Attempts and No Confidence. 

Again, a project blown up to these proportions by this band has never been outside of the realm of possibility; frankly, I'm a little bit amazed it took this long for them to make a record that's more than an hour long. However, filling the holes of exploration with interludes and drawn-out instrumental sections combined with an overall dip in energy and intensity (save for a few brief moments) makes Bleed Here Now not just Trail of Dead's longest and most expansive album, but sadly also the one that offers the least incentive to come back and sit through again.

July 15, 2022 • Richter Scale/Dine Alone

Highlights Penny Candle • No Confidence • Contra Mundum