In a daring attempt to expand the palette of its listeners, ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead made an indie rock album that does a great job at being adventurous, but also gets old very fast. The band does their best to use prog rock elements in their favor, but it ends up making the album very bloated and overdone. I think that there was a really good image in mind for Tao of the Dead, but the execution was too grand to be done correctly, and came out sort of anticlimactically.
fav tracks: Summer of All Dead Souls, Fall of the Empire, Pure Radio Cosplay (reprise)