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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.
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"A lot of the record is like that -- the music sounds upbeat, but the subject matter is really heavy," says Keely.
No kidding. On the standout track "Wasted State of Mind," Keely sings that he's "caught in a stasis" again. The melody, though, starkly contrasts this idea -- layering a manic, glorious mess of Polynesian drums (again, sampled) and a plunking piano that sounds as though it's feverishly trying to play catch up. "Naked Sun," the first song Keely wrote when he moved to Austin, is inspired by indie rock icons Beat Happening, and features a barroom blues groove so rollicking, it sounds like a prelude to a sawed-off pool cue in the face. And then there's the effervescent indie pop of Trail's first cover song, Guided By Voices' "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory." Originally a brittle four-track beauty, Trail of Dead's version is stacked with dense harmonies, brushed cymbals and massive piano melody. "It was almost like listening to a demo of an amazing song and thinking, 'This is awesome; I want to hear it with pianos and strings,'" explains Keely of tackling the GBV classic. "I thought, 'Fuck, I want to make this super grand.'"
Not every song on So Divided leaps from the speakers. "Witches Web" is a restrained country ballad featuring the expressive violin work of Grammy-winner Hilary Hahn and backup vocals by Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls. (She also plays piano on the Beach Boys-style pastiche "Eight Days in Hell"). "Life," a song partially based on a close relative's relapse and recovery from alcoholism, is even darker, submerging piano and strings beneath a sea of distorted drums and squealing guitars. And the closing track, "Sunken Dreams," is mix of spoken word and multi-hued singing that Reece intended as a nod to the Cure.
Keely says he's working on getting together a fall tour with the Blood Brothers, and that it will be as unscripted as ever. ("Maybe we'll get a fourth drummer this time.") When asked about the band's reputation for raucous live shows -- broken bottles, trashed guitars and bloody faces -- Keely demures. "I started to get annoyed when it felt like a routine. I'm not angry in the same way I was when I was young. That'd be the kiss of death. It's like what Quincy Jones always said, 'You don't write for money. You write music that makes you shiver.'" Indeed.