Album: ...And you know us by the trail of the dead

Source Tags and Codes, Interscope

Two years on from their breakthrough album, Madonna, the Texan cult-metal outfit ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead return with a third collection as turgid and impenetrable as its predecessors. Still favouring the monotone buzz-saw thrash and steely-grey guitar arpeggios that seem to shrink from the very proximity of pleasure, their latest album deals with, according to the press release, "the loss of agrarian innocence in a world preoccupied with numbers and record-keeping, attempting to give us a glimpse into a future that could be either scintillatingly utopic [sic] or unlivably desolate." Well, that explains the track title "Another Morning Stoner", I suppose – a hefty-sized spliff being one of the few ways a band might convince themselves such pompous balderdash was significant (not to mention their overlooking of the ancient Egyptians' development of arithmetic specifically to record their stores of farm produce). So when, on "Homage", they bark the lines: "Do! You! Believe! What I say? What I say?", only the very easily impressed would answer in the affirmative. By nu-metal standards, I suppose, the string passage that concludes the title track and the way "Baudelaire" opens with a fragment of accordion muzak and closes on a hubbub of café chatter are the acme of invention; but when the chord structure of "Relative Ways" irresistibly recalls Stereophonics' "Have a Nice Day", it's hard to sustain the notion that ...Trail of Dead are pushing back the boundaries of musical possibility.