Trail Of Dead Fight Source Tags' Legacy

Lee's Palace

Toronto, ON

on Sep 22 2009

John Papamarko (CHARTattack)

09/23/2009 4:17pm

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead are a band cursed by a near perfect album.

Source Tags And Codes, which came out in 2002, was their opus. It was equal parts raw and elegant, and epic yet accessible. A record like that can do more damage than good, and it almost destroyed Trail Of Dead.

It still might, as an album so great will always wield these destructive powers. It becomes a way to measure everything that comes after it, and everything that comes after seems to fall miserably short.

Fans want to hear something better than Source Tags And Codes, but failing that, they want to hear nothing else. They loathe you for not being able to top it, and loathe you worse for even trying. What a total mindfuck for a band.

Trail Of Dead opened their show at Toronto's Lee's Palace with the slow build of "The Giants Causeway" which led directly into the scream and response of "The Far Pavilions," and valiantly tried to endear the decent (for a Tuesday) crowd at Lee's Palace to this year's The Century Of Self.

The band then stormed through current single "Isis Unveiled," a scathing examination of religion ("If you honor me in kind, I'll be grateful/but be warned/I'm a jealous god") that elicits comparisons to the band's experience with former label Interscope, another casualty of their inability to follow up Source Tags And Codes.

Running through their first three songs in succession — something almost every band does when touring a new record — cast an uneasy energy over the crowd, even eliciting chants of "no more new stuff."

I guess the curse continues.

Almost begrudgingly, the band reached into the back catalogue for "How Near, How Far" and "Caterwaul." During the latter, Jason Reese, who was doing triple duty all night, alternating between drums, guitar and vocals, climbed out onto the speaker tower and sang the second half of the song to the crowd. It was a rare moment of showmanship from a band who have mellowed over the years, rarely trashing the stage or getting into Oasis-esque mid-song fistfights anymore.

Reese then got back behind the kit to share duties with Aaron Ford, and the interplay between the two drummers was most impactful when punctuating the excited desperation in Conrad Keely's voice as he howled the chorus of "Will You Smile Again?"

It's hard to imagine how a band whose music seems to start mid-crescendo can ever top their early successes, and it seems their diehard fans aren't ready to let them move on, so the whole exercise becomes a bit farcical.

...Trail Of Dead are a band being beaten down by impossible expectations, and only time will tell if they'll survive it.