Here is the nicest song about social unrest you will hear this week. Trails and ways’ music joins us from the bay area. Specifically from the home of those baseball inclined elephants, Oakland.

“No Wisdom” is off of their 2nd EP Temporal.  This album deserves your attention if only because of what the band had to endure to make it.

• A robbery.
• Being shot.
• Another robbery. (A laptop containing the only copies of the album.)
• A serious health problem. (the band hasn’t disclosed.)

So most people would curse the world that they live in turn out music that reflected that anger or call even call it quits. Not Trails and Ways however.  Let me introduce Keith Brown, vocalist and guitarist, “The emotional outrage provided a lot of emotional drive for me recording. A lot of people go through an experience like that and want to get vengeance. But I started thinking about these people that robbed us, and the Oakland that produced them. And losing the album sort of gave us a chance to really build it into the most ambitious thing we wanted it to be.”

As a whole Temporal is incredibly eclectic and to this blogger, “No Wisdom” is the standout track. According to Brown the song is specifically about “the United States after the fall, and this generation of us as kids… running around after the wise men have fallen down.”

Temporal  is considered an activist album by the band. 2 of the 4 members work in the field of renewable energy. The album was written in the shadow of the debt-ceiling negotiations and the bailout. Rather grim subject matters to pull inspiration from and set it to a bossanova or calyspo rhythm. Perhaps percussionist and vocalist Ian Quirk has the most tongue and cheek quote that sums up the feeling and sound of Trails and Ways. “After we all die of global warming, me and Keith are going to be rocking in the afterlife. I hear in heaven they’re really into bossanova dream-pop.”

Here is their bandcamp page where you can download, for free, Temporal in its entirety.