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Leaving behind the sprawling epic guitar landscapes that's run through much of their previous work, WORLDS APART sees Texan punks ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead injecting healthy doses of sugar coated pop melodies and honing their material to concise nuggets of three minute punk-pop.
After the dramatic orchestral opening of ODE TO ISIS, a musical passage that's closest in tone and grandeur to what's come before, WILL YOU SMILE AGAIN? bursts into view with big guitar sweeps and big gestures. Slowly building from a lengthy intro of distorted guitar chords this is a song that takes a gradual rise to its eventual peaks of noisy guitar abuse, the vocals
taking the same journey from gently lilting melodies to huge crashing choruses.
The first real indication though of this bands seismic shift from noisy punk rockers to Good Charlotte like pop stars hits with WORLDS APART, a song that immediately smacks you in the face with its sugar sweet melodies. The guitars shimmer with a US alt-rock sheen, and its only the dark lyricism that marks this out from the manufactured slickness of Blink 182, Good
Charlotte and their ilk. In fact, its only when you get to the heart of the lyrics that you get a sense of what ...And You Will Know Us About The Trail Of Dead are aiming for - by sugar coating their music and making it accessible to a mainstream audience, they can slip in their Bush-baiting lyrics, full of anti-globalisation rhetoric and anti-war messages.
THE REST WILL FOLLOW, another radio friendly slice of modern rock hits out at the same targets with the same shiny melodies and pristine guitar attack.
A CLASSIC ARTS SHOWCASE is a near perfect example of US alt-rock as it stands today, taking the emocore sound of classic Jimmy Eat World and moulding it around some Smashing Pumpkins-like arena rock poses, this is a song that pushes all the right buttons, even pausing midway through for an extended piece of stadium friendly breakdown before crashing back in for its inevitable crescendo of anthemic climax.
As if to cover all its bases, ALL WHITE is a slice of orchestral rock opera that ebbs and flows between sweeping theatrics and piano balladry with ease, taking its cues from The Beatles, Queen and The Who. THE BEST, another song with shifting dynamics and rock pomp is all prog rock excess and changing time signatures as staccato guitar chords give way to sections of dreamy orchestral pop and back to bruising choruses.
Something of a shock to anyone having heard earlier albums or witnessing ..And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead live, WORLDS APART is a definite sonic departure. Replacing their aural intensity with an album full of shimmering pop melodies and slick US alt-rock sheen is an initial surprise to say the least.
Less Sonic Youth and Godspeed You Black Emperor and more Smashing Pumpkins, Jimmy Eat World and Good Charlotte, WORLDS APART represents a shift in their sound but not their politics. The smart move of getting their message across through a more mainstream channel, indicates ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead are still playing strictly by their own rules, and also the fact that they do the whole modern US rock thing better than almost anyone else out there at the moment should point you to your own conclusions.

Kevin Allen, Neil Busch, Conrad Keely and Jason Reece grew up in the small Christian community of Planoe, Texas - a place more known for cattle ranches and its single corner grocer that for its music. The four boys grew up in close proximity and shared a love of singing. In junior high they joined the church choir, where they competed internationally in vocal ensemble
competitions.
During college the four lost touch briefly, then reunited in Austin, Texas where Busch was attending UT. There they rekindled their old love of singing, and performed for a while as a four-piece vocal ensemble for church revivals. During a recording session for the Austin All-Male Ensemble they were introduced to Mike McCarthy, who would later wean them into recording artists. After some research in anthropology and physics, the four agreed to try an experiment.
With their limited knowledge of the arts and music, they would attempt to create an entity which would express the theory of anthropological unity: in other words, find a singular expression for various aspects of science and humanities in a form that would reflect the pattern that is present throughout the history of man's ability to create art form, literature and
music. If it worked, the multiple aspects would function together, giving abstract credence to the theory. If it failed, the seperate functions would negate each other, and the experiment would end.
They would call the experiment, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, after a glyph that was challenging the archaeolical and anthropolgical community. Meanwhile McCarthy, who had become a constant presence in their lives, had coaxed the four into a studio. Originally planning to record the group performing two versions of the popular hymns, Lord Of All Hopefulness and Bell Of Creation, they decided instead to put their recent hypothesis into practice. The four's explorations into music anthropology had led them to experiment with idioms in rock music and its commonalities with primitive folk music, especially that originating in Papau New Guinea, Hindu Kush and Polynesia.
Converting the tonal and rhythmic variants of the hymn Lord Of All Hopefulness along a random logarithmic arc, they made the first recording of the, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, experiments, Richter Madness. Over the past several years the four boys, under the name, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, have toured continuously throughout
the US and Europe, also finding time to record three albums. Their first eponymous LP saw the four expanding upon the conversion of ecclesiastic hymnal into secular rock disaster theory.
Their second foray into sound manipulations, Madonna, dealt heavily with the themes of iconoclastic worship, the creation and subsequent defamation of popular idols in the post industrial age and premature cynicism among modern children due to the pressures of our growing information age. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead's next album reflects upon the loss of agrarian innocence in a world preoccupied with numbers and record-keeping, attempting to give us a glimpse into a future that could be either utopic or desolate. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead is currently continuing its research into its theory of anthropological unification, which they intend to publish in the near future.
Interscope Records

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