BrightestYoungThings: ...And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Dead @ RNR Hotel

all photos: Francis Chung

Seeing Trail of Dead on Thursday was kind of like seeing your ex with someone new, looking healthy and happy and not miserable and stressed out. The last time I caught them was two years ago, headlining 9:30 with Blood Brothers opening, right around the release of their last clunker of an album, So Divided. Blood Brothers got about 100 times more cheers and the band didn’t even want to play any new songs. It was clear something was going on. Then, last year, they played Black Cat. Opening for fucking Dethklok. So it wasn’t particularly surprising when I saw that they’d be promoting the release of their new record, The Century of Self, with a stop at Rock and Roll Hotel. Turns out, Century of Self fucking owns, a return to the huge, ambitious, sky-scraping rock songs of their past, and so does the band’s revitalized, back-to-basics sound.

I missed the first opener, Funeral Party, because I am a bad person and have poor time management skills. This is the paragraph about Funeral Party.

Midnight Masses, a collective hailing from Texas and New York, actually includes TOD drummer/guitarist/singer Jason Reece, and played a pretty interesting set of songs that cleverly mixed stoner rock with soul and gospel vocals. Actually, only one song sounded like that. I don’t know, they’re all over the place, but I’m holding out on a definitive opinion one way or another because I think they have a whole lot of potential and I’m really excited to see what they come up with next. They seem to be pretty tight with Trail of Dead (they sang gang vocals on a bunch of songs) and a lot of the members are or were in other noteworthy bands (Santigold, Dragons of Zynth), so I’d expect to see something impressive pretty soon. Also, the girl is pretty and has nice purple hair.

It’s kind of funny that after years of getting used to being a big, fancy, Interscope band (though their new, autonomous label, Richter Scale, is still affiliated with it), Trail of Dead still have sound guys for every single member of the group, meticulously checking each of the roughly 298 guitars on stage before their set. They apparently served a purpose, however, since when all seven (!) members launched into “Giants Causeway,” it sounded something akin to witnessing an epic battle fought in the bowels of Hell. They tore through much of the Century of Self highlights, picked the best songs from their last two albums and played three of the best tracks from 2003’s classic Source Tags and Codes. All in all, it was the best setlist I have ever seen the band go with. My only real complaint with it is that after a fucking earthquaker of a finale with Worlds Apart’s “Caterwaul,” the band chose to play a weak encore with “the first song we ever wrote as a band.” Needless to say, it didn’t really connect with the audience.

Yeah, Conrad Keely is a pretty awful singer. Yeah, there were the inevitable sound mishaps that happen at every show I attend at Rock and Roll Hotel. Yeah, it was so hot and crowded and full of tall people that I almost threw up on the Manute Bol stand-in in front of me. But it was …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, one of the first good bands I ever liked. A band I’ve been conflicted with ever since they started to sort of suck. But holy shit! Thursday night’s performance was loud, intense, energetic and a complete return to form. And for a band as good as Trail of Dead used to be only a few years ago, that’s the best compliment I can give.

Brightest Young Things

Live DC

...And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Dead @ RNR Hotel

SUNDAY 6/10

Marillion @ 9:30 Club

Previously in Live DC:

COMMENTS (2)

Comment

About this Article

Author

Phil!