...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - The Century of Self (2009)

...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead
The Century of Self (2009)

So....how 'bout those Detroit Pistons, eh (stay with me, non-sports fans)? Admittedly not a team I payed a lot of attention to before the 2004 NBA Finals, where they faced off against a juggernaut of a Los Angeles Lakers team, which featured arguably the greatest coach (Phil Jackson), center (Shaq), clutch shooter (Robert Horry), and post-Jordan all-around player (Kobe) all on the same side (well, for the most part). The debate surrounding the matchup wasn't so much whether the Lakers could capture their fourth title in five years, it was how many games it would take them to do it. The Pistons, however, had other ideas. They not only beat the Lakers, they methodically destroyed and embarrassed the Lakers to such a degree that it prompted one journalist to refer to the series as "the five-game sweep" (the Lakers barely eeked out one win thanks to the last-second heroics of the aforementioned Robert Horry). Almost overnight, everybody in the NBA was paying attention to the Detroit Pistons.

The Pistons weren't by any means a flashy team with any outstanding players doing exciting things, they were average or above average players who happened to be outstanding when together. After the Pistons carried their momentum all the way to the seventh and final game in the next years' NBA Finals (where they fell to the Spurs), the next two off-seasons would see them lose both their head coach and star center respectively, something they never quite recovered from. And while they were still winning games and having flashes of brilliance, they had gotten noticeably comfortable and complacent, failing to turn it on when they had to. They often appeared so bored with the idea of a basketball regular season that they hardly seemed to care by the time it mattered most: the playoffs. Today, the Pistons are becoming farther and farther removed from the days among the Eastern Conference's elite teams, so thoroughly muddled in an obvious period of transition and rebuilding that only a glimmer of their past glory remains while a hope for future dominance is on the horizon; though at this point, just barely so.

I don't really have to spell this out for you, do I?

If I were to grade The Century of Self on its first fourteen minutes, I would be hailing the bands' sudden return to form, praising them for successfully melding the energetic songs of their past with the bloated, often melodramatic arena rock sound they've attempted on their more recent efforts. Following the buildup track, "Giant Causeway", "Far Pavilions" sounds plucked straight out of the Madonna/Source Tags-era of their career; the loud-soft-loud dynamic pulled off as successfully as they used to do it (before the soft parts started feeling like awkward, confused transitions to extend the song length). The album then jumps straight into the dramatic magnum opus "Isis Unveiled". I'll spare the fancy wording: this song fucking kills. Yeah, it sounds suspiciously Muse-like (I spy a "Knights of Cydonia" inspiration), but it makes up for any faults with sheer aggression. This is the least lethargic they've sounded in years.

But the album goes on, and proceeds to hit an immediate road block in "Halcyon Days", which isn't a bad song, but feels right on par with Trail of Dead's recent output -- and as you can guess, this isn't a compliment. Luckily, the band gets things rolling again with a trio of good tracks in "Bells of Creation", "Fields of Coal", and "Inland Sea". With these songs ("Fields of Coal" most notably), it's obvious the band, of which the founding members are now well into their 30's, have somewhat regained that certain youthful energy that seemed to drive their earlier work. They're having fun playing again, and I feel young again listening to them.

Regrettably, they can't keep it up to close the album. With a series of forgettable tracks (save for "Luna Park", which is memorable only because it's the most obvious failure: an attempted piano-driven soft-rock ballad), The Century of Self ends with a bit of a whimper. In the end, it's hard to classify whether this album is a success or not. It's most definitely better than their last album, So Divided, and many would agree that it also tops 2005's World's Apart (I'm one of the few that would debate this). It certainly isn't Source Tags & Codes, but at this point no rational person expected it to be so.

My personal vote is to consider it a marginal victory. So Divided was a mess so difficult to defend that I was ready to give up on the band altogether. With The Century of Self, they've shown enough progress to convince me to stick with them through their arduous restructuring process. Like the Pistons, I'll continue to watch their development and hope for the best, but I'll be less surprised if they don't come through when the game's on the line. There's always next year, anyway.


Score: 6.5/10


"Isis Unveiled"


"Fields of Coal"