Pretty Girls Make Graves are a straight-up emo band, with saccharine quirks, or at least that always was the case. But they’re becoming less emo by the year. Concurrently, and contrarily, they’re sounding more like themselves with every step. There have been great records from them already – ‘Good Health’ was spirited and urgent, if scrappy, and ‘The New Romance’ was the original idea made muscular, justified with armour-plated songs that lodged in your head like hot shrapnel. Take the seething ‘All Medicated Geniuses’ and glucose spiked adrenaline shot ‘This Is Our Emergency’. The success of that record was its pounding claustrophobia, ideas rocketing around inside a small cube of intensity – you wouldn’t have wanted to open the door for a minute in case a chink of light got in and ruined the whole damn thing. Only they picked the lock themselves, sorry, and used that same ingenuity to make ‘Élan Vital’.
What we have now then isn’t a different band as such, but it’s not the exact same one. They’ve switched members for a start, which seems like a deft tactical manoeuvre, replacing departing guitarist Nathan Thelen with keyboard maestro Leona Marrs whose ice-fresh influence can be heard right across the record. This is still a band with the same hardened desires and amp settings, but with a much wider outlook they seem capable of so much more. They have lost a little of ‘The New Romance’s immediacy, but they’ve gained a more exploratory writing style, resulting in shifted points of definition and staggered layers of sound.
Andrea Zollo’s voice remains a pivot, exhibiting the kind of strength Karen O can only grasp at when she tries to master control. At the softer end of the scale they help evoke weightless impressions of the Cocteau Twins and Portishead (‘Pearls On A Plate’) and the harsher end the to-and-fro ferocity of a Sleater-Kinney/Throwing Muses hybrid (‘Wildcat’). Elsewhere ‘Pyrite Pedestal’ paints vibrant wisps of dark colour on top of pure Cure pop base, ‘The Nocturnal House’ echoes around razor-edged Bloc Party-esque surges of guitar and is an unusually bright slice of paranoia, and ‘The Number’ is a fuzzy bass-heavy hardcore dance-floor grind floating on a bed of chiming staccato piano. ‘Parade’ is Pretty Girls Make Graves go riot grrrl without the superfluous aggression, is beautifully minimal and them at their best. There is no question that this album is the same.