X: The Godless Void and Other Stories
appeared at a timely point in
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
's career. It arrived six years after the release of 2014's
IX
, during which time
Conrad Keely
returned from Cambodia to the band's home base of Austin, Texas, and also coincided with their 25th anniversary. It makes sense, then, that their tenth album finds them taking stock. As
explore how people become more themselves over time while everything else changes, they deliver their most emotionally direct music in quite a while. Their need to follow their hearts -- even if they get a little broken along the way -- has dominated their music since
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, and the tension between cathartic freedom and poignancy is as powerful on
as it was on that landmark album. They've grown into their reflective side over the years, and they've rarely sounded as relatable, or affecting, as they do here. This is particularly true of the brilliant "Don't Look Down," a look back that isn't so much a wish to return to the past as a realization of just how big the gulf between then and now is. With its gently surging melody and incisive lyrics ("I have another set of eyes/that I use to disguise/the part of me that died/I have another set of lives/I use to describe/The part that's still alive"), it immediately makes itself known as one of the band's finest songs.
Time and again,
AYWKUBTTOD
return to the distance between past and present on
. On "Gravity," they characterize it as the forces that literally hold us down (or back); on "Something Like This," they capture how feelings and memories inevitably fade, even when we've done our best to preserve them. These songs carry so much weight that when the band casts it off, it's all the more liberating. "Gone" builds from a whisper to a satisfying roar, while the hurtling "Into the Godless Void" is a funeral pyre for regrets. Though the album is fairly lean, each song has more than enough musical heft to convey the enormity of the band's emotions, especially on "Children of the Sky," which pays tribute to a fallen friend, and "Blade of Wind," one of the most unfettered epics here. When the relentless beat of "Through the Sunlit Door" drives the album to its close,
confront life's inevitable changes and endings with the inner strength that has defined their music since the beginning. A quarter century after they formed,
is triumphant proof that they're as passionate as ever. ~ Heather Phares