…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is the actual name of the Austin-based band, though they started as You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and later added the ellipses and conjunction.

So right here, this is a hard entry point. I know for me just the name of the band was off-putting, felt overly aggressive and presumptuous. It’s just too many words and syllables. Like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, again, it’s hard to penetrate. It doesn’t even look right grammatically. Like some of the books I’ve tried reading but couldn’t finish, I don’t feel invited in. It’s like you need to be on a list.

But once I stepped inside Trail of Dead (truncated) it was really good. Bear with me on the descriptors: post-hardcore emo with a heavy wall of sound, double drummers, lots of lush string arrangements, two vocalists trading off, a lot of Fugazi influence, Sunny Day Real Estate, Sonic Youth.

I stumbled on a three-hour podcast dissecting the band’s eleven-record discography and listened to it flying back from Frankfurt. I knew the band straddled post-punk and borderline metal, which is like oil and water / the two just don’t mix. So I was curious what real music nerds would have to say about that.

The thing that struck me is how the band comes into their signature sound by about album three, improves on that for album four, starts to drift and go astray, comes back to signature sound with new elements, starts to go stale with over-production, disbands. The best that comes at the end are throw-backs to what came before. But throughout, the patterns and conventions that defined their sound.

It’s a kind of hero’s journey for the artist isn’t it? The early material is raw and unformed but holds promise, peaks, breaks apart, comes back, fades out. The band was like a metaphor for my own writing, or a warning. The grinding away for many years trying to find your voice, to try new things that may or may not work, but always the signature sound, whatever that is for you.

I admired the band for making eleven albums and sticking to what many would call a pretentious name. In fact the songs and lyrics and album art had a bombast too. But it was often really good, is the thing. The double drummer maneuver itself feels weird. But seeing them play live and the energy of the show, the band all dressed in black and angry looking, it was really something. They pulled it off. Trail of fucking dead, yo. They’d been making records since 1999 and just kept going, despite never really breaking through. That made me admire them even more.

Categories: musings

Tags: art, Conrad Keely, post punk, trail of dead