After last year's brilliant Source Tags and Codes, Trail of Dead's latest effort was possibly one of the most anticipated releases of the year. And sweet lesions on a parrot, is it a let down.

The five song EP offers lo-fi recordings that sort of wave at their previous release briefly and then take off to crapsville. There is no real connection between the songs, and in fact, this record could be diagnosed with either ADD or MPD. The styles vary so much it borders on the vulger; at times it seems that Trail of Dead want to become the next Strokes, then they switch gears and go for an imitation of the Faint. It really just never seems to click, and has none of the heart or flow of Source Tags and Codes, which was an exceptional album.

About the only real selling point of this record (aside from it's sticker price, this copy was around five bucks) is the multimedia portion of the cd. Much like Cursive's Ugly Organ, the cd includes an interactive self-contained program which contains videos, an art gallery, some live footage, and on-line interactive materials that are pretty cool. In fact, they should have dumped four of the five songs and just released the media stuff.

-Dave Mandell