After all those years of concerts with a lamentable lack of crowd surfing, I’ve hit two in a row where musicians mindlessly toss themselves into the care of their equally addled listeners. What luck! What passion!
What butt-rock!
If there’s indeed a continuum with Metallica at one and and Explosions in the Sky at the other, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is certainly on that continuum. And exactly where they lie thereon shifts from album to album and track to track. At Saturday’s Bowery Ballroom concert, they slid and shifted along all night.
Trail of Dead are almost never quiet. The show went swiftly from one piece to another, barely giving opportunity for the tinnitus to ebb before heating the amps back up. With a current lineup of six talented musicians, all playing ‘til fingers are well-blistered, it is indeed a wall of sound. Actually, that’s not accurate. Is the spiky/crush-room of death in Indiana of Jones and the Temple of Doom really just a couple of walls? Or do we call it something else? Point being, Trail of Dead produce a Spiky/Crush-Room-of-Death of Sound. Appropriate, that.
Joining Trail of Dead onstage for some of the new tracks—those that were recorded with layered vocals or small choirs in particular—were members of opener Midnight Masses. Though their voices were hard to discern through the S/C-R-o-D of Sound, what sound did eek through made me sad indeed to have missed their set. Let that be a lesson to all of us.
Since The Century of Self dropped, I’d been eagerly awaiting the Bowery show. I figured that it’d be a completely different experience to stand in the midst of a wildly flailing 18+ crowd and hear a nuanced interpretation of the album that I so very much enjoy. And I was largely right, though didn’t especially love the quickly expanding moshpit experience toward the front of the orchestra. But the infectious energy I was hoping for was most assuredly there. And they’re worth seeing just for that.
That and the reasonably excellent song-writing.
Stimulate the economy! Buy The Century of Self
