Album: Source Tags and Codes Release Date: 2/26/2002 Length: 46:00 Label: Interscope Rating: 8.7 |
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| Track Listing | |
| 1. It Was There That I Saw You (4:02) | |
| 2. Another Morning Stoner (4:33) | |
3. Baudelaire (4:16)  |
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| 4. Homage (3:29) |
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| 5. How Near, How Far (4:00) | |
6. Heart in the Hand of the Matter (4:48)  |
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| 7. Monsoon (5:53) | |
| 8. Days of Being Wild (3:27) | |
| 9. Relative Ways (4:03) | |
| 10. After the Laughter (1:15) | |
| 11. Source Tags and Codes (6:08) |
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| Review | |
| "Let me hold you in my arms, dear / Let me melt in the heat of your gaze" | |
| You would probably expect to hear these lyrics sung over top of a sensual and sultry minor chord progression by, say, Barry White (though he would probably not be asking permission), rather than an in-your-face, all-out, headbanging electric guitar sequence. However, you may be surprised to discover that the latter instance, which occurs during "It Was There That I Saw You", Source Tags and Codes' opening track, comes across with more sincerity. This is ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead at their best. | |
| The Texas-based foursome is back for their third LP release, the first on a major record label (Interscope, who are pushing for the band to shorten its name). They have come a long way musically, and especially lyrically from their debut self-titled release, which began with the presumably tongue-in-cheek line "Okay this is a song about killing everybody, let's all sing along now". While most legendary indie bands are thought, perhaps unfairly, to begin a downhill slide once they ink a deal with a record company, the Trail of Dead's musical creativity seems to be utterly unaffected by the Interscope connection. In fact, they are still improving and maturing at a rapid rate, as Source Tags and Codes is here to show. | |
| The album opens with the aforementioned "It Was There That I Saw You", which alternates back and forth between the Trail of Dead's two primary approaches, Really Loud and Really Soft, leaving no middle ground. The result is breathtaking. After a short introduction, the song explodes (there is really no other word for it) into a two-chord frenzy accompanied by excellent percussion (which is prevalent in each track) and lead singer, Conrad Keely, singing words like the ones located at the top of this review -- not exactly the death and destruction outlook employed on their earlier albums. | |
| "It Was There..." flows nicely into track two, "Another Morning Stoner", earning major points from me. If there is one thing I love, it is an album that actually flows together like....well, an album. After listening to disc after disc that sounds like a few unrelated songs thrown together, it is a pleasant surprise to hear one like Source Tags and Codes. As band member Jason Reece points out, "It's almost like it's reading a good novel, not a bunch of short stories." The beauty of this record's production is that it is not difficult to discern where one song ends and the next begins, but somehow they run together seamlessly anyway. This is definitely not the type of the record with which you will want to utilize your CD player's 'Shuffle' function. | |
| But I digress. | |
| "Another Morning Stoner", on of the best songs on Source Tags and Codes, is immediately followed by "Baudelaire" and "Homage", which are two of the songs that I most frequently skip over on the album. Nonetheless, there are no bad songs to be found on this disc, so even these two, especially "Baudelaire", which is more of a traditional rocker than the frantic and blistering "Homage, are worth hearing. | |
| "How Near, How Far" is a song that, after two or three listens, I felt I had known for all my life. Though not even my favourite song on the album, it is the tune I most often find running through my head, where the indelible refrain "How near, how far, how lost they are" is permanently engraved. On the subject of my favourite Source Tags and Codes song, however, that honour would be bestowed upon the next song, "Heart in the Hand of the Matter". This epic immediately vaulted itself into the Top Twenty Favourite Songs Ever class, in my books. It would be an injustice to attempt to describe it on this page; just listen to it as soon as you can. | |
| "Monsoon" and "Days of Being Wild" follow closely on the heels of "Heart in the Hand of the Matter". While good songs in their own right, these two have no intriguing qualities that make them stand out from the plethora of great songs found on Source Tags and Codes. Both, however, do share one characteristic that is common to each of the album's tracks, that being their gradual build-ups and dramatic finales. Directly after these finales, in some cases, you are hurled into the next song without a chance to regroup, as is the case after "Days of Being Wild" concludes and the disc's first single, "Relative Ways" kicks off. | |
| "Relative Ways" is perhaps the most approachable song on Source Tags and Codes, and one that I would recommend to first-time Trail of Dead listeners. Packed with catchy guitar lines and lyrics like "It's all right, it's okay / It's coming together in relative ways, yeah", this is the album's primary candidate to receive any radio airplay -- though even that might be stretching it. "Relative Ways" fades out into the aptly-named "After the Laughter", a piano-driven segue that sounds quiet and unassuming after the driving force of previous tracks, connects "Relative Ways" with the title track masterfully. | |
| "Source Tags and Codes" sounds almost joyous after the first forty minutes of the disc. While "joyous" is not a good word to describe the song (especially with lyrics such as "Spent half my life deciding what went wrong / Trying to find out what took you so long" and "Take me from this place I know / This ruined landscape that I once called home"), there is a sense of optimism, a look ahead to a brighter future, in the major chords found throughout the song. | |
| Fifteen seconds after "Source Tags and Codes" concludes, and you think the ride is finally over, the string quartet enters. In one minute and fifteen seconds, this 'bonus' track brilliantly adds a certain closure to this classic album in a way that is very unlike any other final song I have ever heard. | |
| And the end result is wonderful. | |
| Rating: 8.7 | |
| - Luke Adams |
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