And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Relative Ways EP
(Interscope)
And You Will Know Them By The Trail of Money.
In the middle of the top 10 of VH1's top 100 "Hard Rock" bands of all time, VH1 personality Sebastian Bach described Nirvana as (paraphrasing) "the first band to combine heavy metal and pop (insert devil horns hand sign)."
With Durst money in hand, Trail of Dead leave behind post-punk for the greener ($$$) pastures of pop-metal and pop-punk. Past efforts to recreate "Teenage Riot" are revisited in "Relative Ways," the title cut of this teaser EP, however with each way it matches "Teenage Riot" in form and guitar style, it misses out on everything that makes "Teenage Riot" a great song: power, grace, purpose, scale, etc. Instead it is just a light but noisy punk song. Insert a three or four chord hook; act all emotional; build a little, getting noisier; repeat hook until song is of standard radio play length.
"Homage" (the other album cut on this four song tease) is noisier and punker, but ultimately just as vapid and by-the-numbers. With this song, Trail of Dead prove it's just as easy to emulate Drive Like Jehu as it is to emulate Sonic Youth if you're not held to the restrictions of actually creating interesting music in the process. Play three chords noisily for a while, making sure the vocalist is screaming; abruptly stop what you're doing and keep it quiet for a couple bars; okay, loud again; repeat until song is of standard radio play length.
The two non-album tracks on this tease are pointless drivel. "Blood Rites" must be a parody song. How else can you explain the long scream of "blooooood" and pure metal posturing? "The Blade Runner" is a one-off experiment that goes nowhere and does nothing, a twiddling and twoddling industrial soundscape. It's obvious this EP is a tease in the purest sense of the word as these two non-album tracks are completely different than their normal material... no killer, all filler.
Trail of Dead may have followed Sebastian Bach's formula for Nirvana's success with their new EP and Interscope deal. However, they've actually come much closer to being this decade's Alice in Chains.
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