Matador Records has a great reputation of sticking with artists for their entire careers. Folks like Spoon, M. Ward, and of course Superchunk have been with the label for ages releasing record after record with the label without thought to leaving or pursuing other avenues. So it's kind of surprising when you peruse the labels' catalog and come across a band like ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, a band who have had an amazing career but only put out one record on the label. But sure enough after the relative success of Madonna, the band jumped ship to record their universally adored Source Codes & Tags with Interscope records. I guess the money won out in the end, and the certainly maintained their artistic integrity releasing the best album of their career, but Madonna often gets overlooked thanks to the success of that one album.Having an overlooked album isn't the same thing as having an underrated album. An underrated album are those quiet gems that fill local record shops, the kind that may just be perfect in the area they were made in, or maybe they never quite got popular enough for how good the band was. There's a ton of examples of these, but I'm not gonna list 'em right now. Overlooked means that you got a decent review out of it, people dug it and started to buy into what you were selling, but somewhere along the line you recorded something that blew the doors off of that and everyone forgot what you had done before that. Madonna is that kind of record. People totally forget it was there, despite some great tunes like "Mark David Chapman" and "Mistakes & Regrets". Sure, a few diehards will yell these out at every one of your shows, but most of the people are there because you made Source Tags & Codes and want to hear that word for word beginning to end.
The shame of this whole world of overlooked records is that even the fans that bough it forget about them. Think about yourself, think of all the times you listened to one album from an artist and forgot about all the rest. It sucks, but it happens all the effing time. Once in a while it pays to go back though, to forget about that record that everyone loved the crap out of and hear all the slight imperfections of earlier stuff, or hear the band building their sound over. Madonna will never match what the next Trail of Dead album was, but it was important and good for it's own reasons.
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - "Blight Takes All"
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - "Mark David Chapman"
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - "A Perfect Teenhood"
Previous Merge 20th Blasts from the Past:
Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island
Magnetic Field's Get Lost
Wwax's Like It Or Not
2 comments:
This is a band I had entirely ignored, but those are some good tunes. Thanks, as always.
"Mistakes and Regrets" gave me a 404 page...bad link?
very thoughtful. if you haven't listened to their debut in the past...say, 2 years you should give it another try. sure it could use a little remastering, but its as good if not better than Madonna. i kind of like to pretend that they stopped recording albums after that Elena's Tomb EP.
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