Austin's ?And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead break shit. They smash their instruments onstage. They splinter the traditional punk format by colliding classical music with art rock. And they scatter their interests through the arts, sciences and centuries?at least that's the case with Trail of Dead's Conrad Keely, who can move naturally from talking about PBS' special on the human brain to Frank Lloyd Wright to Bach without sounding like a pretentious fuck.
The band's ability to crash through sonic boundaries?as acts like Pink Floyd, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine did before them?yields music that's intensely complicated and aggressively beautiful. Their new record, Source Tags & Codes (Interscope), is a symphony of moving instrumental sessions fired up by squalls of noisy guitar and agitated vocals. I interrupted Keely (who, like the rest of the band, plays a little bit of everything) at the piano to talk about jazz odysseys, The Little Mermaid and boy bands.
That's great to hear some piano there. Usually when I talk to a guy on the phone and he's playing an instrument, it's a guitar.
[Laughs] Or a saxophone.
I take it you were raised on piano lessons?
No, unfortunately I was self-taught out of boredom. But it gave me an unorthodox way of playing.
I guess that unorthodox style is still in your system. Source Tags & Codes is pretty complicated emotionally. The vocals and guitars will be really tangled and furious one moment, and then behind that you'll have a really sad string arrangement.
People are capable of so many emotions, there's no reason not to reflect them all. Coming out of a punk tradition and at the beginning of the 90s, it just seemed like punk was all aggressive. There was a period in the 80s where punk was so undefined it could've been anything. It was so arty. Sonic Youth could be punk. Hüsker Dü could be punk. And then once mainstream got ahold of it, punk had to be people with spiky hair and leather jackets playing three-chord songs. All the other multifaceted aspects of punk got thrown out, and suddenly we were just left with aggressiveness, and that was disillusioning. That was our breaking with it, saying we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves.
It's easier if you start out openminded so you can move in three dimensions instead of jumping from one sound to another.
Yeah, and you know, we have limits. That's one of the strong points of working with four people where there's no "singer/songwriter," but we all are working toward one ultimate goal. We have a system of keeping each other in check.
That way you stay away from the art wankery.
[Laughs] Yeah, there's no, what's that word? There's no jazz odyssey.
But still a pretty broad range of instruments. Listening to your record I picture this studio just stacked with equipment.
Well, we always use a real piano. And we had a 10-piece string section in Nashville. We had someone come in and play a tenor and baritone sax and a bass harmonica, and in the segues he plays the clarinet. The percussionist had hammered bells, and there's a timpani roll in the first song, too.
It sounds like the full rock orchestra.
We're actually afraid of that. Once the strings are there, suddenly it's like The Little Mermaid or some Walt Disney animated feature and it's like, oh my God. We had to find a way to wrest them in there in a subtle way, and not sound like it was Journey to the Center of the Earth. But there were other things that we wanted to do that we never got around to. There was even this idea of doing a more Beach Boys-style harmony or feature more of a solo instrument, like what we did on the previous record. But you get to a point and you have to say this is it. Stop now. We didn't want to have another Beach Boys Smile on our hands.
I'm also interested in the way you guys break your instruments onstage and make the shows completely different experiences from something you get on record. I hate bands that stand there like they have stage fright and stare at their feet the whole time. When I see a live show, I want action.
We loved all the early Crash Worship, and even the early Unwound would break the live barriers. A lot of the early Northwest stuff was very experimental in that way, but it goes even further back into the living theater in the 60s, the idea that theater can and ought to bring the observer into it. In a way there's almost a scientific pretext behind it?there is no way to take the observer out of the observation. We thought the shoegazing reaction toward rock that happened in the 90s was such an abomination. We just want to be ourselves onstage and that means being loud, rambunctious individuals. We were also coming out of a small Austin party scene where it was such an interaction between the handful of bands that were around at the time and everyone in the audience. When we moved from the parties into the clubs, that didn't change. We wanted to at least try to give the audiences a taste of what it was like when we started here in Austin.
It's not necessarily about destroying these instruments, though. We obviously use the same instruments night after night. They're not destroyed. They're hanging on by a thread, but they're functional [laughs]. They're just being used. Instruments are not supposed to be objects of art that are mounted on a wall. They're like the tools of the trade. You beat on a hammer until it's broken and then you throw it in the trash until you get a new hammer.
Since you seem to be constantly working hard at sonic experimentation, what kind of long-term effect would you like to have Trail of Dead have on music?
Saving it from the boy bands.
?And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead play March 11-12 at Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (Bowery), 533-2111.