...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - IX

There’s also plenty of reason to question Trail of Dead’s ongoing relevance, too; as part of a November UK tour in support of this new record, IX, they’ll play the now-twelve-year-old Source Tags & Codes in its entirety in London, a move that hardly suggests that they’re brimming with confidence in the new material - not to mention that the current lineup is a far cry from the one that recorded that album. On the other hand, a recent PledgeMusic campaign to fund their Tao of the Dead Part III EP exceeded its goal, so there’s no question that a sizeable cult fanbase still exists. It’s probably also fair to say that they won’t necessarily be let down by IX; quite whether they’ll be thrilled by it, though, is another matter entirely.

Things kick off in promising fashion with “The Doomsday Book”; all menacing synths and rolling drums, and with a vocal turn from Conrad Keely that drips with conviction, it proves that Trail of Dead don’t necessarily need to keep things chaotically energetic to endear the listener; they do, though, need to offer them something else, and in this case it’s a touch of something that hints at the epic. You can say the same about “Jaded Apostles” too, in fact; marching band percussion, Kelly on aggressive form and simmering guitars come together to make something that’s not necessarily prime mosh pit fare, but certainly carries enough threat, enough brooding atmosphere, to create something that sounds genuinely arresting.

The trouble, though, is that the decision to shy away from the more frenetic side of the Trail of Dead sound often leads to IX meandering; the gentle slow-burn of “The Ghost Within” kills the early pace stone dead five tracks in, and later, the instantly-forgettable “Bus Lines” takes six minutes to go precisely nowhere. It’s frustrating, because when the band do shoot for epic territory, they get it right almost every time; the crashing “How to Avoid Huge Ships” and seven-minute-plus, largely instrumental “Lost in the Grand Scheme” are testament to that.

The couple of tracks that close the record are confusing, too, especially “Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears”, which does some ill-advised experimenting with strings. The tribal percussion that characterises the breakdown on “Sound of the Silk” is a strange choice too; why, you wonder as you listen to the spoken word section that closes the album on that track, have they only decided to start playing around with genuinely new ideas now, with the album almost over? It at least proves that Trail of Dead are by no means a spent creative force, but they’re going to have to try harder to recapture the genuinely visceral energy of their classic records if they’re ever going to reach beyond their own fanbase again.