Trail of Dead: Full of Life

And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead has already earned a place in rock history for one of the longest group names, but the Texas quartet’s frequently thrilling concert Friday at the El Rey showed it also has a strong chance to make history in a more significant way.

Like Detroit’s White Stripes, Trail of Dead is one of a growing number of bands that is reviving many of rock’s most valuable traits, including passion and creative ambition, during a period when both those qualities are in pitifully short supply.

It’s a band with the punk-aligned independence and classic rock sensibilities that would have made it fit in as an opening act for the Clash in the ‘70s, U2 in the ‘80s or Nirvana in the ‘90s--but it’s apparent the band is going to do just fine headlining its own shows during this decade.

The most immediate element in “Source Tags & Codes,” the group’s major label album debut, is its striking sonic design. The twin guitar-driven, multilayered assault has been compared with everyone from Sonic Youth to the Stooges, but the most useful reference point is Jesus & Mary Chain, the great British band of the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

In such Mary Chain albums as “Psychocandy” and “Dark- lands,” brothers Jim and William Reid combined brutal guitar distortion with lovely, almost Burt Bacharach-like melodies to express the desperation and doubts that separate us from our grandest desires and dreams.

Trail of Dead places more emphasis on the forceful textures than the comforting melodies, but the result is a more varied and multidimensional sound.

Most important, the band doesn’t fall into the contemporary trap of using aggression only to express anger.

There is a restraint onstage and on record that allows the music to convey contrasting, even contradictory elements, providing intense moments that are hopeful as well as anxious.

The group’s three lead singers--guitarist Conrad Keely, bassist Neil Busch and drummer Jason Reece--join guitarist Kevin Allen with an interlocking force that generates a white-heat power onstage.

Trail of Dead comes out of the same Texas scene that produced At the Drive-In, the promising hard-rock band that split up last year, and it too is known for chaotic stage shows, where instruments are often hurled and drum kits demolished.

The latter could quickly become gimmicky, but the musicians kept it to a minimum on Friday. Busch did throw his guitar across the stage at the end of the blunt-edged “Mistakes & Regrets” early in the set, but it seemed a natural extension of the frustration of musicians who can’t always get all the intensity of a song from instruments alone.

On “Source Codes,” the themes range from man’s dark nature (the pain and shame outlined in “Baudelaire”) to tales of isolation (in the apocalyptic “Heart Is the Hand of the Matter,” there is talk about wandering among vacant lots and fluorescent malls, one-room coffins and crowded halls).

At the El Rey, Trail of Dead mixed about half the songs from the new album with material from earlier albums in a concert whose ultimately idealistic tone was defined by “Relative Ways,” an exhilarating expression of the power of rock ‘n’ roll to uplift and inspire.

In this era of overly calculated mainstream bands, rock needs groups that can restore belief in the future of the art form--and Trail of Dead does just that.