: : Gigs - ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead : :

Their recent album may be an overcooked stew of steaming pretension and honking ambition, but as a live act …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead offer everything their record lacks: sheer energy, great songs, and a frontal lobe-bruising amount of noise.

Forget studied slacker-cool, if you want proper, no-holds barred geek action then look no further than The Black (at least, we think that’s what they said they were called). What appears to be some kind of side project for Trail Of Dead’s Kevin Allen, and featuring a violin cameo from his bandmate Conrad Keely, their awkward mix of 60s pop, 90s indie and all kinds of things in-between is mainly watchable thanks to the peculiar mannerisms of their uber-geek frontman, and the sheer implausibility of their association with an act such as Trail Of Dead. Sound problems don’t help us to really get a grasp of what they’re trying to do though, and we conclude that perhaps recorded material would be a better way of assessing this band’s strange appeal.

I must be one of the few people in the crowd more excited about seeing Division Of Laura Lee than Trail Of Dead. There’s something about their fuzzy, driven garage-punk sound that has always touched a nerve with me. It may be a little disingenuous to make special note of just how ugly a frontman Per Stålberg really is, but seeing as he does himself (“I know I look scary, but I’m not really”), I’ll forgive myself.

Musically the band are on fine form, giving songs from recent, disappointingly mid-paced Das Not Compute a much-needed fuel injection – especially album highlight “Dirty Love”, sung by bassist Jonas Gustafsson, which gets an excellent thrashing through.

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