Sometimes a band can be a little contradictory.

Sometimes a band's music can fit perfectly in the background, and yet be the kind of music that intricately fascinates you.

Sometimes a band can blow you away by being impeccably melodic while still having enough power and raw energy to shatter your eardrum into a million pieces.

Sometimes a band feels the need to start its name with ellipses.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is this band. Atmospheric, dynamic, mesmerizing, musical and aggressive, just pick a positive adjective and it will most likely apply to these guys.

In its third album, last year's Source Tags & Codes, the Trail of Dead created 45 minutes of perfect indie rock, managing to be both progressive and concise.

The album gets underway with the astonishingly fast "It Was There That I Saw You," an absolutely paint-peeling song that somehow becomes a slow, haunting passage, building slowly until it rushes blindly back into a reprise of its aggressive opening.

From there, it's into "Another Morning Stoner," a song that in a perfect world would have been the biggest hit of the year.

By the time singer Conrad Keely begins asking/screaming, "What is forgiveness?" it's impossible not to be hooked. "Another Morning Stoner," much like every track on Source Tags & Codes, is the kind of song that sounds a little different every time you listen to it. There's always something more to pick up, always a little more musical mystery to glean.

Even in between songs there are odd little instrumental transitions to smooth out the journey.

There is never even a moment of silence.

"Homage" begins as a pure-punk song, but that only lasts for about 20 seconds before it begins to take the atmospheric and jittery shape that the Trail of Dead add to all of its songs. It's the track that most clearly juxtaposes the extreme ends of the band's sound.

The band lets surprisingly beautiful vocal harmonies and quick bursts of percussion drive "How Near How Far."

"Days of Being Wild" finds the vocals buried beneath a driving guitar that slams over top of a series of anguished yelps.

Perhaps the most straight-forward song on the album, "Relative Ways," finds Keely's voice beginning in a whisper and gradually raising with the music. The song turns the formula of much of the other songs on its head. The vocals become the focus of the song as Keely's tone becomes more pained as every nuance of every word comes through clearly.

There's not a bad song on Source Tags & Codes. Actually, saying that all of the songs are good doesn't even do them justice.

Each song is outstanding, and they're strung together in a way that makes the album extremely cohesive and utterly brilliant. Just try to find something wrong with it.