...And You'll Know Us By the Trail of Dead

The new And You'll Know Us By the Trail of Dead album, Worlds Apart, is pretty much incredible. The first track came on and it was like a post-hardcore Queen. The following track was more like straightforward emo and I started thinking that this might be a transitional album where they try some new things, but aren't quite ready to fly. It piqued my interest, but I wasn't prepared for what followed. The album proceeds to unleash travels down many different musical roads that nonetheless lead to one rather ambitious destination. Over the course of the album, they touch on piano pieces, classical, emo, post-hardcore, rootsy punk and others. Even the more mainstream songs have subtley quirky rhythms or peculiar instrumentations with strings and even timpani (it sure sounded like kettledrums) that make this album big, like arena big without compromising it's hardcore roots. While Mars Volta moved beyond post-hardcore (does that make them post-post-hardcore?) into prog (progcore as Chuck astutely observed), And You'll Know Us By the Trail of Dead simply takes the post-hardcore thing they'd done well previously and makes it big and expansive. There's no compromise here, just an expansion of boundaries.