Pretty Girls Make Graves

Pretty Girls Make Graves are a quintet from Seattle (Andrea Zollo on vocals, Nathen Thelen and Jason Clark on guitar, Nick DeWitt on drums, and ex-Murder City Devils' Derek Fudesco on bass) that resurrected the Fastbacks' naive punk-pop, as announced by the singles Sad Girls Por Vida (2002) and By The Throat (2002) and the exciting mini-album Good Health (Lookout, 2002), particularly its lead-off track Speakers Push The Air.

The same verve permeates the first songs on their first full-length, The New Romance (Matador, 2003): the effervescent Something Bigger Something Brighter, sung in Zollo's most girlish register, the hard-rocking The Grandmother Wolf (burning riff and pounding drums), and All Medicated Geniuses (a fractured pseudo-ska number), Unfortunately, the fun lasts for just about 10 minutes. The rest of the album is dull and uninspired. This should have been an EP.

The band replaced guitarist Nathan Thelen with keyboardist Leona Marrs for Elan Vital (2006) and the sound benefited greatly. Marrs seem to play Brian Jones to Andrea Zollo's Mick Jagger, adding all sorts of instrumental subtlety to the vocalist's istrionics. In fact, their post-emo-core has mutated into a less angular but more conceptual form of progressive/aggressive sound a` la new wave. Piano (the anthemic Parade), accordion (Selling the Wind), synthesizer (Speakers Push the Air), etc. lend the songs a much broader appeal and deeper sense of purpose. Song structure is kept malleable (the convoluted dynamics of The Magic Hour) over a solid rhythmic foundation (the post-disco groove of Domino).