...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead (3.5 stars)
Worlds Apart
The press kit for Worlds Apart comes with a précis by Conrad Keely (guitarist, sometime drummer and one of the group's three singers) titled "The Death of the Enlightened Amateur: A Brief Summary of Key Developments in Western Music." If it has a tongue-in-cheek moment, it's hard to find, reading like the overly earnest musings of a graduate student.
Fortunately, on Worlds Apart, Keely's band with the too-long name is more playful, if no less ambitious. ... And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead has made an epic out of its unpromising base of emo and indie by expanding to the breaking point into music that, at times, is as dreamy as Yes and as driven as Minor Threat.
Every generation needs a Hüsker Dü Zen Arcade and if Worlds Apart isn't destined to be a similar coming-of-age classic, it is at least a vast and mature song cycle that rewards repeated attention and devotion without sacrificing any of the essential rocking out. Even with the large amount of filler on the second half, it is clear on tracks like "The Summer of 91" and "The Rest Will Follow" that, as with Hüsker Dü, Trail of Dead's secret weapon is a gift for melody never entirely buried in the overblown production and wild distortion.
Maya Arulpragasam (0 stars)
Arular
I remember in art college when the first video effects machines became widely available. Suddenly, every video had swirls of color, odd squiggles, floating text ... you name it. It was a massive visual OD.
I get the same sense from Maya Arulpragasam's debut effort, Arular, who oddly enough also studied film in art school. Spin magazine claims she "fuses hip-hop's cockiness with dancehall's shimmy and the cheap and noisy aesthetics of punk." Well, they got the cheap part right, because all of the dozen tracks here sound like they were wrung from a sequencer. Oh wait, they were!
Arulpragasam (or MIA, as she hopes the media will call her) lays down flat, annoying vocals to tracks with names like "Bucky Done Gun" and "Freedom Skit." The titles are no doubt inspired by her father, known by his nom de guerre Arular, a founding member of a rebel Sri Lanka group with ties to the Tamil Tigers terrorists and the PLO back when they were doing things like killing Olympic athletes. Little wonder then that her family was forced to flee—back to her native London.
Reminiscent of the sophisticated video–game sound effects produced by a Commodore 64, Arulpragasam brags about her lack of talent with the naïve arrogance of youth: "Yeah, I can't play and sing but I'm going to do something you could never copy and do," she once said.
Much is being made of Arulpragasam's attitudes toward war and violence. Someone should tell both her and her father to stop dropping bombs for a start.