X: The Godless Void and Other Stories appeared at a timely point in ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Deads career. It arrived six years after the release of 2014s IX, during which time Conrad Keely returned from Cambodia to the bands 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 ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead 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 Source Tags & Codes, and the tension between cathartic freedom and poignancy is as powerful on X: The Godless Void and Other Stories as it was on that landmark album. Theyve grown into their reflective side over the years, and theyve rarely sounded as relatable, or affecting, as they do here. This is particularly true of the brilliant Dont Look Down, a look back that isnt 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 thats still alive), it immediately makes itself known as one of the bands finest songs. Time and again, AYWKUBTTOD return to the distance between past and present on X: The Godless Void and Other Stories. 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 weve done our best to preserve them. These songs carry so much weight that when the band casts it off, its 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 bands 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, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead confront lifes inevitable changes and endings with the inner strength that has defined their music since the beginning. A quarter century after they formed, X: The Godless Void and Other Stories is triumphant proof that theyre as passionate as ever. ~ Heather Phares

Rovi