Having weathered so much adversity in their short career (starting with the demise of their original label and indefinite shelving of their first EP), the members of Red Bank, NJ's the Parlor Mob must be breathing a collective sigh of relief over the release of their first album, And You Were a Crow, in early 2008. If not, then at the very least it seems that the weight of these worries actually benefited the precocious quintet's songwriting, by lending a little extra weight of resolve and authenticity to their rootsy, retro-fueled but nevertheless contemporary sounding hard rock. This stems from a veritable melting pot of '70s influences, which the Parlor Mob go to great lengths to break down into their various basic ingredients before building them back up into exciting groove rockers like "Dead Wrong" and "Real Hard Headed," as well as beguiling, paired-down acoustic numbers such as "Angry Young Girl" and "Can't Keep No Good Boy Down," so that only a few anal retentive music obsessives might recognize their origins.
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 …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.
In the spring of 1966, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears represented a genuinely new sound, as fresh to listeners as the songs on Meet the Beatles had seemed two years earlier. Released just as "California Dreaming" was ascending the charts by leaps and bounds, it was the product of months of rehearsal in the Virgin Islands and John Phillips' discovery of what one could do to build a polished recorded sound in the studio – it embraced folk-rock, pop/rock, pop, and soul, and also reflected the kind of care that acts like the Beatles were putting into their records at the time.