Austin's ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is one of the few bands that seduced me with violence before it got me with music. The word on this four-piece was that its members destroy their equipment live, which really gets my panties wet--because if I have to watch one more fucking delicate emo act tremble through a set, I'm leaving puke stains on the stage. High-energy music needs bottomless reserves of action and attitude. I love punk 'cause it's aggressive as all hell, and live, Trail of Dead is a forceful act.

But that doesn't mean the band comes through town like a fraternity on spring break, bruising everything within shoving distance. There's a method to TOD's mad stage antics that involves the crowd, says multi-purpose member Conrad Keely. "We loved all those Crash Worship shows and early Unwound," he says. "A lot of the early Northwest stuff was very experimental in that way, but even going further into living theater of the '60s, the idea was that theater ought to bring the observer into it.

"The shoegazing reaction toward rock that happened in the '90s was such an abomination," he continues. "We thought that was going to be the end [of rock] if that was the future, but more than that, we just wanted to be ourselves on stage, and that means being loud, rambunctious individuals."

Being themselves also means the guys tackle equipment like they're dousing a raging fire--which, Keely explains, doesn't mean the end of their gear. "It's not necessarily about destroying these instruments. We obviously use the same instruments night after night. They're hanging on by a thread, but they're functional," he laughs. "They're just being used. Instruments are not supposed to be objects of art that are mounted on a wall."

But the band that's now well known for smashing up a stage shouldn't just make history for making a near scrap heap out of its tools. TOD is a talented act, in a noisy-punk-meets-refined-art-rock way. Its recent major-label debut, Source Tags & Codes (Interscope), is a volatile emotional run, as somber orchestral melodies get overrun by temper tantrums of screaming squalls and guitar noise, which fade back into quiet string sections and trails of ambient samples between tracks. Source manages to sound off ebullient calls and spew bilious anger just by shifting the musical dynamics. With a team of instruments (including cello, trumpet, violins, piano, timpani, and hammered bells) expanding TOD's erratic mood swings, the band members (Keely, Kevin Allen, Neil Busch, and Jason Reece) swap guitars, bass, and drums to keep the apex of their noise tangled and intense.

Keely says TOD's non-traditional coupling of classical passages and corrosive rock is a purposeful reaction against punk's narrowest definitions. "There was a period in the '80s where punk was so undefined, it could've been anything. It was so arty," he says. "Sonic Youth could be punk. Hüsker Dü could be punk. Once the mainstream got ahold of it, punk had to be people with spiky hair and leather jackets playing three-chord songs, and all the other multifaceted aspects got thrown out. That was our breaking with it, saying we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves."

At the other end of the spectrum, though, Keely says the band has to keep itself balanced to avoid becoming a group of experimental jerk-offs whose work languishes in the studio. "We have limits," he admits. "One of the strong points of working where there isn't one singer/songwriter is that we have a system of keeping each other in check if we stray too far from this imaginary border. There aren't too many, um, jazz odysseys," he laughs. "We had to find a way to wrest [the orchestral arrangements] on the new album in a subtle way and not sound like Journey to the Center of the Earth or something like that."

TOD is far from sounding like the latest band to get whisked into comic over- experimentation, though, and Source is already proving that these Austin residents are gifted sonic scientists. Although the music is pretty all-consuming, TOD does have altruistic aspirations outside of crossing the borders between Pink Floyd and At the Drive-In. When asked what kind of impact TOD would like to have on rock, Keely pauses, then jokes, "Saving it from the boy bands."