...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Madonna

...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD: or how to create chaos with great style. The good words from the reviewers at "Metal Hammer" recommended me to listen to them. They are a band capable of connecting catchiness to their ability to portray aggression. There are billions of bands that are now able to combine melody with rage, especially in Death and Thrash metal groups, but here it’s not just melody; they draw from rock into pop, thanks to and through aggression. Yes, because this is what emerges from the band, a desire to break, to create violent mayhem all in a melodic or at least catchy way. What do I notice when listening to this album for the first time?: Great initiative, visibly original, good technique, a taste for melody, a lot of charm, and above all anger, rage, nervousness. The "And you..." better known as "Trail Of Dead" are an original band with light and subtle nuances of distortion and psychedelia... They essentially create a middle ground between rock and metal, and the singer throws in a nice punk tone. The album is overall very good, but a paradox arises: how can an album be violent and at the same time calm, melodic and at the same time noisy and become "MOnotonous" as the track list progresses? I don’t know, and I can’t explain it. Let’s say that their innovative style with which they present themselves at the beginning continues to live until the last song, not introducing anything new or otherwise noteworthy enough to say "And as if that weren’t enough, now listen to what they do!". In other words, the songs seem nice but too similar to each other.But let us proceed in order. The album opens with "And You Will Know Them" which is not a song but is a really cool intro! The name of the band (an immense name) is spoken by a television subjected to constant channel surfing, then "Mistakes & Regrets" enters the scene which should be the representative song of the album. From here you understand who or what you are about to listen to. Personally, I consider it the most valuable; it has a nice rhythm and a nice melody, almost danceable I would say, but don’t take my word too seriously as it is always a rock/punk/heavy piece; the drums accompany a surfer guitar that duels with a very angry voice, trying here and there to calm the voice's anger by giving the bass time to soothe the atmosphere but to no avail, the drums become more enraged and consequently so does the voice (excellent). It’s "Totally Natural"’s turn, here the Trail Of Dead mix things up, in the sense that they break everything down; from a nice rock metal, it leads to an explosion (in the true sense of the word) followed by other heavy tracks like "Blight Takes All" and calmer ones like "Clair de lune" (But calm in comparison to the rest of the album, because if you really have to find a calm song on this CD you won’t find it). In "Flood Of Red" the waters calm a little, and "Children Of The Hydra's" is just a break (this album is full of them) but recovers with "Mark David Chapman", an almost pop, easily catchy rock motif. After yet another interval, this time "Up From Redemption" stadium-like, "Aged Dolls" is shot where the music creates a calm and relaxing background, occasionally interrupted by the voice, and then it’s serious business! The album comes to an end, so after "The Day The Air Turned" (another interval) and "A Perfect Teenhood" which is typically punk, it begins tough and develops extremely violently, in the midst of the chaos a voice relentlessly shouts "Fuck You Fuck You", then like calm after a storm, a wave of "psychedelic pop" brings the track to a close, the taste of the end is taken by "Sigh Your Children" which is a song for a complete overdose. I haven’t yet had the chance to listen to the subsequent albums, but I hope for the band that it has progressed, in the sense that to the original style that presents them publicly, some other peculiarity has been added that ensures subsequent albums are good at first impact but internally are not so monotonous. I still consider it an innovative album and advisable to those who indeed want to listen to something different.