Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 13/11/06
Label: Interscope

When Texan tearaways …Trail Of Dead first mugged us for our hearts and minds, their weapons were a killer blending of Sonic Youth's artfully detuned, tumescent noise with Fugazi's focused fury, and a thrillingly incendiary live show whose fabled, gear-trashing finale made The Who look like a chamber orchestra of maiden aunts. Understandably, the band didn't always play off-piste and thus often pissed-off those who'd come along not for the songs, but for the spectacle.

Indications that Conrad Keely, Jason Reece and co were tiring of noisily eruptive expectation came with their third LP, 2002's "Source Tags And Codes", which attached a grungey, Smashing Pumpkins-like burr to their angst and again with last year's "World's Apart", where psych pop and even gospel-toned rock were their fury's emollients. "Superb!" yelled some, when those albums dropped. "Sell-out!" snarled others. Fans of the old-school, crash-and-burn …Trail Of Dead doubtless hope the band will soon right themselves after what they regard as a serious creative wobble, but "So Divided" challenges them to accept the changes - or move on.

It is the confident statement of a reconfigured band with a newly vital aesthetic. That said, Keely and Reece haven't quite flushed the baby away with the bathwater on their fifth long- player: "Stand In Silence" suggests an emo-reared Pumpkins milking "The Little Drummer Boy" for funereal sweetness; and thunderous closer "Sunken Dreams" resembles one of their complex, cut-and-shut epics of yore, booting The Cure's "The Hanging Garden" back through grunge and goth to NYC's art-punk scene. It's the differences that reveal the album's true identity, however.

"Naked Sun" is almost unrecognisable as a …Trail Of Dead tune, its darkly minimal and sleazy, blues groove recalling The Kills before building to a full-blown, orchestral outro. Atypical too is their cover of Guided By Voices' "Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory" - reinvented as a piano ballad and thus owing more to Elton John than Robert Pollard - and the terrific "Life", a lurching piano essay that channels swampy, New Orleans hoodoo via The Beatles and could soundtrack one of Tim Burton's gothic fairytales. Elsewhere, there are echoes of Foo Fighters' molten metallic pop and even (briefly) the scuffed country soul of Gram Parsons.

"So Divided" sees …Trail Of Dead leaving their footprints in some intriguingly unlikely places. Whether the faithful choose to follow them or not, they deserve respect for that alone.

    by Sharon O'Connell