Uncontrollable falling down syndrome

I'm devastated that Indie Rock fans 'round the globe must now be engaged in a discussion very similar to the one I've just been having with my music chum, Jams.

Josh, "What the fuck is with this new ToD album? It's like they forgot what they were doing, or how to use their instruments or some shit."
Jess, "I just... it's just not good."
Josh, "Okay. This last track is pretty good. In a not-interesting-even-a-little-tiny-bit kind of way."
Jess, "Have you listened to the whole thing?"
Josh, "No... no, I got through the first two tracks and got pissed off. Okay, okay I haven't listened to the title track here. It's the title track, it has to be good, right?"
Jess, "Well... usually."

The title track from ToD's new album So Divided plays.

Josh, "..."
Jess, "..."
Josh, "Okay, so this is like a big joke where ToD... they, they must have released a fake album to piss off every body who ever liked them because they hate their fans."
Jess, "Yeah..."
Josh, "This is shit."
Jess, "It's Shit."
Josh, "For fuck's sake, this sounds like Wings."

That's pretty well exactly how our intake of So Divided has proceeded.

While all of the tracks are certainly listenable, they occupy an entirely new realm of music to my ear. The kind that is able to make you forget that you are in fact hearing music and is better processed by that part of your mind accustomed to ignoring CNN and CMT while you flip around for cartoons to watch. I may've actually listened to the album in its entirety already, I don't know. I can barely muster a solid memory or words to describe any of it except, "It bored the hell out of me and I forgot where I was for a forty five minutes

That's a little harsh, but this is coming from a jilted fan. Trail of Dead will always be among the canon of My Favourite Bands Evarr, but it's looking as though I'm going to have to excise the memories I have of everything post-Source Tags & Codes to keep them there. Hold on, Secret of Elena's Tomb came out after ST&C, so everything after that. I don't know what happened to these men after 2003, whether they suffered from the overreaching nature of their endless ambition, or any such wankery as Pitchfork and co. would have you believe, but any listener of sense must agree that it's been a decidedly downhill journey for the Trail ever since the last few seconds of the flawless Intelligence ticked away.

Jess, "Noo!"

Okay, let's talk Worlds Apart. I loved that album fiercely for the first track and a half. Big opener, I love it. Still gets big reactions at parties. Nothing beyond that is genuinely worth a damn. Oh, there's that one track where Conrad wheezes about rock and roll and the twin towers or something. And he swears at schoolchildren. Rock and rollll.

Get your own blog, Jams.

There are, admittedly some drops of old-school ToD pizazz to be found, I think. The album is generally a blur of half baked annoyances, which confusingly underemploy every single piece of talent ToD have in their arsenal. For example: why, WHY does this band have two drummers when every track proceeds at a stately 4/4 high hat tappin' beat? It's like -

I'm sorry, the song Eight Day Hell just came on and I am now weeping uncontrollably. The band has finished raping Wings and, not being sated of its appetite for godawful blandness, is now violating the Polyphonic Spree in all of its four hundred members worth of orificii.

Agh. As I was saying. We all know this band has talent. Technical ability, sharp songwriting, and Conrad's unique bad-but-good singing - all this skill couldn't have just sauntered away in the off-season. Worlds Apart was blaise, but brought the chops. Said chops simply weren't put to the same effect they had been on previous outings. So Divided, even with such talent at the ready, is confoundingly devoid of any massively hooky guitars, prog rock dynamics, creatively utilized strings, or savage drum beat downs which once made the band great. Kevin Allen and Conrad's legendary guitars are so horrificly underused, and on many tracks actually, unthinkably absent, that these men ought to be slapped with a heavy fine. Conrad's voice, unfortunately thrust into the spotlight as it is, is nowhere near strong enough to carry the album, and makes one beg to have it once again clothed in a thick wall of noise. The man is whiny.

These new songs are so hopelessly toned down it's comparable to building a spaceship out of cardboard boxes and tin cans. You are supposed to be doing something amazing, and you will never do it in this way.

I think I was trying to talk about the album's good parts.

They are there, but only briefly. I've been listening to Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory on repeat, trying to imagine that the band can still produce compelling vocal strains and polyrythmic harmonies like they once did. It is, like all other tracks, extremely underdone, but succeeds in a minimalist way that recalls Counting Off the Days. A little bit. It even reminded me, for a moment, of David Bowie's Five Years, as Conrad pipes his imitation-British wail over a meandering rock piano. Then again, unlike all the other tracks on So Divided, this is a freaking Guided by Voices cover, which would be a delightfully ridiculous premise if they hadn't dropped it smack in the middle of the rest of this album.

Life, in a similar manner, is a foot-stomping singalong that reaches achingly toward busting out ST&C calibre guitar crashes, but never does. The drums thump along with acceptable oomph, but I still cannot fathom the two drummers who brought us Baudelaire, or Relative Ways, or even Will You Smile Again? could plod along at such a lacklust pace. What's worse, this is typical of all the songs on So Divided. The band positively teeters on the brink of cranking it to eleven, but inexplicably reel themselves in to fart out another lounge-pop song not worthy to be an Oasis b-side.

It sounds like the band is being held hostage, they and their skills tied up and forced to play gaunt musical tributes to other, lesser bands under threat of immediate and painful execution. They try to break free, they do, but are restrained by pistol-whipping and broom-sodomy.

I'd forgive them if this were true. This album really is bad.

Naked Sun is a terrible faux-blues rock number that attempts to channel Led Zeppelin but simply sounds amateurish. I have never heard such a poor incorporation of woodwind into rock, and I once listened to a Dream Theatre record all the way through.

Wasted State of Mind packs what must be the most ridiculously poor imitation of tribal drumming ever put to tape, accompanied by jarringly out of place piano. I don't know what ToD drummer #2 was smacking around, but it sounds like a small wooden bongo. This track, ironically enough, eventually stumbles into what is arguably the album's most memorable moment, a soaring vocal chant that is at least as good as anything on Worlds Apart. But, again, the band simply does not rock. They do not even kind of rock. This is a rockless album, inoffensive and impotent. I wanted to love it, but there is sincerely nothing to love about a limp-wristed voyage through wankery.

In fact, Wasted State of Mind is capped off by an accordian solo. Case in point.

So, now the band that was once the definition of tightness, heaviness, and melody in the indie genre has made a record suitable for the "Adult Contemporary" pile, and that saddens me beyond words. It's difficult to believe that musicians who used to be renowned for their insatiable ferocity, a band that would destroy their equipment, their bodies, and any worldy stage simply as an expression of their unrelenting intensity, could be reduced to this.

But we'll always have Source Tags & Codes.