They don't make many bands like Pretty Girls Make Graves anymore. The Seattle quintet probably stopped being cool in a trendy sense around the time I got turned onto them, a bit after 2003's The New Romance. As great as that record was, it showed a band mellowing and growing up in a way that made their frantic 2002 debut, Good Health, sound even better. Third album Elan Vital was even more mature, and now, this June, one of indie rock's best-named groups is set to break up. And I think I'm starting to go bald. Pretty fucking depressing.
But still not as depressing as all the limp indie pop copyists filling the Pitchfork mailbox. Good thing there's Montreal trio Land of Talk to keep rocking out in PGMG's harried post-hardcore idiom. Frontwoman Elizabeth Powell's smoldering, harmonically complex fretwork and assured vocals help distinguish Land of Talk from the multi-layered massiveness of their city's best-known indie collectives. Instead, think Toronto's Tokyo Police Club with less treble and no handclaps, the Strokes, or sci-fi. Originally released in Canada last year, Land of Talk's blogger-beloved debut mini-album should finally hit U.S. stores like an unseasonably hot North wind.
While the Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP is a muscular record with gut-level riffs and fist-pumping choruses, it gets there anything but directly; you know you like it long before you know why. See, it's tough to know what Powell's saying half the time, and her guitar-playing overloads on melody so that it ends up communicating mostly mood-- in a year without Marnie Stern and Charlotte Hatherley, her chops might've been the story. The rest of the band stands out most clearly when the songs downshift from urgent release to tense restraint: drummer Bucky Wheaton's portentous cymbal falls and bassist Chris McCarron's undulating groove on finale "Street Wheels", for example.
More often, Land of Talk storm ahead with the night at their heels, escaping lethargic beginnings on "Sea Foam" and getting buffeted by wind sound effects on "Breaxxbaxx". Somehow Powell finds a way to balance early Cat Power fragility and PJ Harvey volatility; whether mumbling indecipherably or singing about "fuckin' around," girls who "still piss their pants," or the dangers of drinking when already tired, she's always in command. Hard to believe she used to sing in a whispery pop group called Ele_K*. Then again, if Alanis Morissette taught us anything, it's that Canada is a land of reinvention. As PGMG's Andrea Zollo once observed, "When I turn it up loud/ Yeah, nothing else matters."
