Trail of Dead's new album 'X: The Godless Void and Other Stories' review: A Cambodia-inspired noise rock epic
Post-hardcore alternative rock virtuosos …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (often abbreviated Trail of Dead) are returning after a six-year musical intermission with their 10th studio album 'X: The Godless Void and Other Stories'. The full-length LP is due out on January 17 on Dine Alone Records in North America.
The group sought in solemn desire to begin work on the new album in 2018 after co-lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Conrad Keely returned home to Austin, Texas, following five years in Cambodia, rejoining fellow founding member and partnering vocalist Jason Reece.
The American group formed in 1994 in Austin and played their first show in 1995, the same year they released a live rendition of the hauntingly discordant
'Novena Without Faith' as a demo on a mixtape via Golden Hour, an underground cassette-only label.
The band has swept up a niche sound since then, capturing the intrigue of those who listen to them with their spellbinding rendition of what can only be described as noise-rock. The album title 'X: The Godless Void and Other Stories' suggests a subliminal description to the theme of the songs, although one realizes that it gears its listeners, rather, to find an explanation through each listen of the songs.
Each track from the album drifts and expands, offering multi-dimensional plateaus of sweeping harmonies and rhythms that, in turn, dip into its fair share of "softer" sections of music. Its highs are extreme highs with each instrument pummeling away in mathematical coordination to produce music that does not jar, but rather elevates the emotions of the listener and covers over with a blanket of psychic-vision-inducing synth-orchestral.
Although the depth of such multi-layered tones could be enhanced further with a richer and more emphasizing recording quality, the overall tone provides atmospheric suspense that is both pleasing and energizing towards feelings of the unknown. The opening track 'The Opening Crescendo', an intro track (with strange chants and chimes), provides an early eery hint towards the album's impressive mystical themes.
'X: The Godless Void and Other Stories' varies in many degrees between tracks but it carefully sweeps us through beautifully with multiple harmonies and instruments married with powerfully charged drumming and modulated vocals. The album's most pressing track 'Into The Godless Void' clasps its listeners to its "noise-rock" elements, pushing at full steam with drumming that yields to no boundaries and Jason Reece belting out guttural vocals.
The track 'Blade of Wind' adopts a dystopian cyberpunk feel pushed as a rock song and reminiscent of a slower and electrified contemporary Rush song. One of the slower songs 'Gone' opens in similar veins to a Deftones track or a song from A Perfect Circle, albeit it adds electronica enhancements to it.
The stay in Cambodia had a large part to play in the influences of 'X: The Godless Void and Other Stories' and as a result, the album sees Keely detailing “the sadness of moving away from a place that I’d loved,” while also taking inspiration from Steven Pressfield’s book 'The War Of Art' to face his own demons regarding the creative process.
He says, “I feel like I’m writing pop music. It’s just not Top 20 pop. It’s the pop music I wish was on the radio, the pop music I would’ve grown up with.” Reece agrees, citing English bands Talk Talk, Killing Joke and American artist Laurie Anderson as inspirations.
“There’s definitely the idea of loss, leaving someone or something important in your life, but it’s more abstract,” Reece explains, adding that the track 'Into The Godless Void' in particular deals with “this existential woe that all humans tend to go through – feeling that weight that plagues the mind.”
'X: The Godless Void and Other Stories' was produced by Trail of Dead's own Conrad Keely alongside engineer Charles Godfrey who worked with the likes of Sinkane, of Montreal, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to name a few, and comes as the band enters their 25th year together. …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead will kick off the album release with a show at L.A.’s Masonic Lodge in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery followed by a couple of weeks of West Coast dates.
