AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

Source tags & codes

LP/CD, Interscope

“Source Tags & codes” is the album that is in everybody’s mouth and hopefully ears right now. Some albums just hit the right spot in time and spread out like a virus. Let’s be thankful that all those marketing-pros and media-strategists haven’t gotten behind the tactics of hitting that right spot, because then we would be bombarded with “the right album at the right point in time” until all the beauty and spirit of the moment would be drained out and it would all become just another marketing-trick, easily recognisable and just as easily avoidable. The other question is what it will do to the band. Will it survive the hype? Is there a hype? Can a band with a name as eerie and strange as “…and you will know us by the trail of dead” really strike it big? Moreover, if that band is making great music with various layers and meandering intonations, isn’t it doomed to failure? I have watched a long line of bands, promising bands with big aspirations, lots of energy and original artistic approaches do the same steps and the final one of signing on to a major label. Some make it, some live through the progression and either arrange a comfortable life for themselves. A few really make it big. The biggest part goes down the drain. Same old story. Time will tell.

I know that you have read all about this band and this record that you wanted to read since it was released. Cracked is not a news-oriented medium. I am not even sure if we are a medium at all. This is the state of things: a record takes its time to hit the stores here in Vienna, Austria. Then it has to find its way to my home somehow (no, I don’t receive promos. I buy records just like you do.) Then I have to listen to it. Then I start to write about it (if I think there is something I can say about the record.) And finally the review has to find its way onto the website. A month goes by like nothing at all and for all the real media, such as magazines, MTV and VIVA and whatever, the record is already old news. Yesterdays fish. But not for me. And, I guess, not for the listener. While rock-journalists (who are really the lowest form of human live imaginable) run on along a never-ending stream of free entry to concerts, promotional records and senseless ramblings, the listeners stay at home and listen to the records they have bought. I can only imagine the number of record-reviews that get written without the writer even listening to the music at all. Not to speak of really listening to it. Deeply and truly getting into the music. The modern production-cycle and the high pressure of new trend after new trend make this impossible anyway. After this short excursion into the Cracked-proof of quality, what makes AYWKUBTTOD such a good band to be mentioned here (aside from the pressure that this is a record that you just have to write about).

It’s the overflowing abundance of different layers that make up their music. The many different structures and streams that are contained in a single song remind me heavily of the way bands like Unwound or even Sonic Youth used to make their songs. They build up a dreamlike wall of sounds, containing mainly drums, bass, guitar and vocals, that will enshield you in a warm state of euphoria. A song like “heart in the hand of the matter” is very much like a flying carpet that speeds through a visionary landscape with you on top. There is another thing, which I cannot describe better than to call it a certain ancient mystique or an air of otherworldliness that clings all around the noiserock if the band. Sure, they can rock out wildly, but the energy is mashed into a whirl of other sounds and noises that make the whole endeavour somewhat obscure. It is like travelling along the trail of a long dead, legendary person such as Hemingway or St. Valentin.

You won’t find a lot of records that are on the one hand as compact and tight as this one, and on the other so loose and spread out. A record that seems so clear and identifiable before and that becomes so mysterious the more you hear it. But never loses its thrill and energy. Here is my guess: Interscope will drop the band after the current phase of initial euphoria because the haven’t sold enough records. The band will be lucky because their old label will offer them to make some more records in the old way. They will do it, slowly burn out and return to their dayjobs. See, times have changed. Nowadays it is possible for a band to make really good records on major labels. But that won’t help them any. A major-label-record may stay as obscure as one on an independent label. Anyway, “source tags and codes” will make it into a lot of annual charts and secret files of album classics.