ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

A sweaty-palmed Conrad Keely looks ill at ease plopped before a grand piano in the uptown New York City offices of Interscope Records. For one thing, he just moved to New York after twelve years of keeping his experimental rock group ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead grounded in Austin, Texas. The band's future is unclear, as fellow multi-instrumentalist and band co-founder Jason Reece isn't relocating anytime soon. (He opened the Austin branch of NYC/L.A. staple Beauty Bar last spring.)

Add to this the less-than-stellar commercial success of the band's grossly ambitious -- and critically lauded --- 2005 album, Worlds Apart. (Despite rave reviews, the album sold a meager 50,000 copies.)

"I thought I was happy with it at first, but once your confidence is undermined, your attitude changes toward your writing and you start feeling like a failure," Keely admits plainly, settling into the spacious office he's taken over for the week while he finalizes the cover art and sequencing for Trail's next effort, the tentatively titled So Divided (due out October 3rd).

That sea change is captured blow by blow during So Divided's opening track, "Stand In Silence." Lyrics couldn't be more literal, as Keely cries out, "I had a band/I had a song/Where has my vision gone/I turned inside to find walls of doubt/My mind was stripped of sound/I had to stand in silence." Musically, however, the song is anything but stripped. It's bursting with minute sonic detail -- a reflection of Keely's continued fascination with computer programming, sampling and virtual "soft" synthesizers. Beginning with layered dialogue snippets from 20th Century Fox's sound library, the track sounds like a hundred TVs being turned on and cranked up one by one. As the talking and toasting reaches a symphonic peak, the song kicks into punchy power pop for several minutes before dropping into a valley of swaying drums and buzzing synths. The mix is perfect despite the changing sonic moods -- no surprise, given that the band collaborated once again with their longtime producer Mike McCarthy, who recorded them in his Texas studio.