XL CD REVIEWS

Trail of Dead, Voxtrot, J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton, The Alice Rose

'So Divided' goes down a proggy trail

Monday, November 06, 2006

And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead

'So Divided'

(Interscope)

Volume 3 of Trail of Dead's dance with taste-making major-label-subdivision Interscope finds our heroes strewn about the country, wondering where it all went wrong.

Primary Trail songwriter Conrad Keely makes his home in New York these days, while Red River fixture Jason Reece is increasingly known as much for his ownership of a Beauty Bar franchise as his status as Trail's drumming, screaming id.

Having mastered chaos and feedback in their early days, Trail now seems obsessed with detail and nuance. Where myth and lies once ruled the day, "So Divided" tackles everyday bummers, tries to make them proggy and massive: moving fewer than six figures of an album, a pal's drug abuse, that sort of thing.

"I had a band/ I had a song/ Where has my vision gone," Keely sings on "Stand in Silence." Music includes discreet and layered samples, guitar solos and sounding like Queen. (Dig the percussion on "Wasted State of Mind"! Man, there's a lot of piano! Is this supposed to sound like a Keely solo album?) Complicated emotions equal complicated songs, I guess.

They haven't forgotten their indie rock roots (their gilt-edged, wedding-cake cover of Guided By Voices' "Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory" reminds you that GBV's Robert Pollard might be the only rocker alive who actually deserves a tribute album). But let's not kid ourselves: They were so much younger then; they're older than that now.

— Joe Gross

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Voxtrot

'Your Biggest Fan'

(Playlouder)

The older brother in me wants to pat them on the back and muss their hair for turning the effete pop that they love into buzz-worthy music that the entire Internet-using undergraduate population and increasingly large hunks of Europe seem to adore. This is their third straight EP of delicate indie pop anchored by Ramesh Srivastava's soft-yet-didactic voice and beautifully detailed lyrics ("People like you made me so much stronger/ People like you made me question blame/ Huddled in strength like birds on a sloping wire.")

All three songs seem to gloss disillusion and disappointment. "Your Biggest Fan" regrets meeting an idol, "Trouble" does sort of the same thing to a junkie and gets all record collector in the process. ("I bought your record out on Cherry Red/It wasn't good, oh, it was great/ I believed it was the next step"). "Sway" (not the Stones song) questions love over strings and acoustic guitar.

But the fan in me wants to pressure the tunes to be catchier, sharper, hookier. The band's idols the Smiths wrote songs that sound great as guitar pop, show tunes or metal covers. That should be Voxtrot's goal, and they aren't a third of the way to where they could one day be.

— Joe Gross

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J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton

'The Road to Escondido'

(Reprise)

Despite his guitar-god status, Eric Clapton has remained humbly reverential toward his own heroes. When he gathered them in Dallas for his Crossroads Guitar Festival two years ago, it wasn't a summit meeting so much as the act of a rich fan with enough pull to make a fantasy concert bill come true. But it turned into a career-summiting moment when he played an unexpected set with J.J. Cale, author of "After Midnight" and "Cocaine" — not to mention a "can you believe I'm witnessing this?" experience for everyone who was there. Their natural ease together was evident then, and still is on their first album collaboration. They sound as if they've been a duo all their lives — as if they could create a hundred versions of Clapton's Cale covers.

In fact, that's the problem with "Road to Escondido": it comes off as Clapton doing one long Cale cover, with Cale along for the ride — or vice versa; it's actually hard to tell them apart at times — except that Cale wrote 11 of these tracks, and co-produced.

When the man who sits atop Mount Olympus chisels a stone tablet with one of his own deities, we expect "Riding with the King." What we've got is not a bad album (though the opener, "Danger," is a bore), and it kind of grows on you. It's just a little too slick, a little too bland, like, say, a beer commercial soundtrack. One we've already heard before.

— Lynne Margolis

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The Alice Rose

'Phonographic Memory'

(self-released)

Austin songwriter JoDee Purkeypile is as singular as his name. It would be easy to attach the "Beatlesque" tag to the singer and guitarist, who wrote every song on the Alice Rose's debut LP, but as much as Purkeypile toils in the melody mines, he's too ambitious to reach for simple hooks to hammer the hummable into the subconscious. He and the band, which formed in 2001, bury the "yeah, yeah, yeahs" on "Stop," the album's best shot at airplay, and roll out complex pop tunes such as "Wisteria" and "Ocean" that challenge listeners to follow the sound wherever it takes them. Power pop is supposed to be sleek and breezy, but this is what Squeeze would sound like if a young Syd Barrett were a collaborator.

Is this all too artsy for its own good? Perhaps. "Phonographic Memory" won't have major labels salivating. But there's something to be said for bubbling under when the common inclination is to burst out.

The Alice Rose will celebrate its new album's release with a set at Waterloo Records on Friday at 5 p.m. and a show at Ruta Maya later that evening.

— Michael Corcoran