NME ARTICLE [April 2000]

ALL HAIL SOUTHERN GOTHIC INDIE-ROCKERS ...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

1. Their name? Well, there hangs a tale...
The band have described it as deriving from "a codex of Malayan origin", but as brilliant bullshitters (see 4), it's best to disregard that. Long band names were once in vogue in their resident Austin, Texas, and the band took inspiration from friends who were thinking about starting a band celled Behead The Prophet, No Lord Shall Live Whatever, the Trail of Dead - Conrad Keely, Kevin Allen, Jason Reece and Neil Busch - are an explosive blend of Sonic Youth and garage rock, and their live performances have audiences in fear of their lives. They look like mods, too.

2. They come from a small town
The Trail Of Dead are from Plano Texas - a town so small even a move to nearby Austin seemed like a way forward. Back in Plano, the group had ended up playing at their church, when they were still a duo. In Austin, meanwhile, the smallness of the scene meant the band worked hard at developing their stage act so the show wouldn't get boring for the people that had seen them loads of times. It didn't.

3. They have a hectic live show
To say the very least. One reviewer of a show in 1999 began her piece by simply listing ten objects that had flown from the stage and come close to hitting her, while a bouncer at a club they were playing in Ohio took action against "one of the little mama's boys" when the first of their guitars few into the crowd. The way Keely escaped a beating was to say that he knew exactly the trajectory of the guitar, that it was never going to hit anyone, and that, above all, they were professionals. He wasn't being strictly honest. The band operate on a knife edge of brilliance and sheer incompetence, have been known to fight onstage, and are among the most unbookable bands in Austin. Their gear often breaks. "It's as though there's some kind of weird jinx or something," Keely has said. "And once that happens, we have to really rely on looking as if we're playing, rather than actually playing."

4. They are brilliant bullshitters
Just listen to some of these choice snippets of genius soundbite. "I know that when I talk to people, they're definitely afraid, Reece has said. They think that we're always taking acid and doing cocaine, which is completely not true. You can buy tons of crack in Texas. There's a seedy underbelly. And the Trail of Dead are right there with it. Of course, we're all upstanding citizens. We're a paradox; we're the living paradox. We're the oxymoron of your dreams. We're the sweetest evil that you can come across, that you will witness." Well, quite. And their exuberant live show? Simply explained, by Reece. "Basically, it's pillaging of our own bodies. We pillage our bodies as we roll about, and then we play these love songs that have no meaning to other people other than ourselves,'

5. They can't escape the truth though
Reece and Keely started the Trail Or Dead shortly after arriving in Austin from Hawaii via Olympia, Washington, in 1995. the details of how they got from Hawaii to Texas are tangled (and, suitably mythically, completely unrecorded), but once they arrived it was the intervention of Paul Vodas from the group Glorium who helped set them on the correct path: after a series of shows with Glorium in and around Austin, they began to get noticed. A chance encounter at a football match led to the addition of Kevin Allen (like Reece and Keely, another drummer and guitarist), while Neil Busch had previously played in Andromeda Strain.

6. They have a concept
Not for the Trail Of Dead the easy option of saying their second album, 'Madonna', is a mess of art-rock noise made by people with pretty good haircuts. No way. No doubt due to a surplus of half-remembered college theories, with 'Madonna' they claim to be building a unified conceptual statement with guitars. It's not a record, they claim, this is art - the art that inhabited the brains of the progressive rock behemoths and the Daisy Age conceptualists De La Soul, Good, strange attitude.

7. Their LP wouldn't be as good if they hadn't had their van nicked.
The Trail Of Dead one day returned to their van to find that it had been broken in to and the contents - every bit of kit they had owned since they were teenagers - had been stolen. A heavy sentimental blow, but one with a fortunate kickback: the group had to cancel a tour, and instead spent a bit more time building their art. Whereas they recorded their self-titled debut in a week, and mixed it in two days, 'Madonna' took seven months to do, and in a slightly un-punk rock way, it's all the better for it.

8. All the band are multi-instrumentalists
Which lends to the element of chaos at their gigs. Each band member sings the songs they write, and so there's usually a bit of dawdling between the onslaughts of psychopathic behaviour, which is quite pleasant. It is, however, to be seen less as a series of technical hitches than an example of the Trail Or Dead as a societal model.
Reece has said. "We're definitely not Marxist. We're sort of caught between anarchism and whatever you call this society that we live in. What is this place called? America?"

9. There's a very cool picture on the sleeve of their first record
And it shows a characteristic audience flabbergasting at the hands of the Trail Of Dead. Th e band are able to identify everyone in the crowd apart from one person. They suspect it was a representative of a major record company who boldly announced his arrival, then left unimpressed. His loss.

10. They have a sneaking admiration for Yes
Particularly the 'Relayer' LP which they reckon is a punk rock album The nutjobs.