Not so favorable review of TOD show (NYC) from fluxblog:
To be very honest, a lot of my motivation for sticking around through And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead's performance was rooted in a lingering feeling of pity that came after reading this thoroughly depressing Pitchfork interview with band leader Conrad Keely. As I watched the show, I couldn't help but think about how miserable Keely came across in that feature, and how his band's grand ambitions almost always led to either commercial or artistic failure.
The band is constantly reaching for grandeur, but aside from the key tracks from Source Tags and Codes, they end up with these sort of pompous, overblown songs that do not earn their emotional weight. Their two most recent albums are like the musical equivalent of Oscar bait -- it's all gravitas for its own sake and unimaginative signifiers of artistic significance propping up mediocre compositions.* When they do write something quite special, such as the Source Tags opener "It Was There That I Saw You," they go and butcher the song in concert, with Keely's thin, off-key voice barely poking through the over-rendered mess of guitars and plodding percussion.
The band's live show gets a substantial shot of adrenaline when drummer Jason Reese abandons his kit and switches to lead vocals on some fierce hardcore numbers, but in spite of his stronger voice and considerable stage presence, it only complicates the band's obvious and crippling identity crisis. In the Pitchfork interview, Keely seems baffled as to why his band isn't hugely popular, and the answer is just so incredibly obvious: Aside from having a pretty terrible name, they have no recognizable persona. Keely is a fine guitarist but a lousy singer; Reese is a decent frontman but for a different band; and their new album sounds absolutely nothing like their live show, which itself is going through at least four different identities over the course of an hour and thirty minutes. It is good that the band are willing to try different things, but without some dominant personality or unifying style, they end up sounding unfocused and often quite generic.
