To be honest they’ve been around a few years now, so there seems little point in rolling out all manner of shocking announcements and introductions. The band are from Montreal in Canada and, let’s face it, given that we’ve had no end of successful Canadian bands in the last five years – Arcade Fire, The Dears, Hot Hot Heat, Broken Social Scene, New Pornographers, Stellastarr* – it seems equally unworthy to start banging on about ‘new scenes’ and unruly, national ‘backlashes’. Land of Talk, a three-piece comprising singer and guitarist Elizabeth Powell, bassist Chris McCarron and drummer Eric Thibodeau, released their extended debut EP ‘Applause Cheer Boo Hiss’ in April 2006 in the States and they release it again on One Little Indian.
Coming together through a combined love of Nirvana, Fugazi, Weezer, and ‘all the Canadian bands of our generation, garage-bands, basement-bands’, the band have played over 300 shows, and whilst singer, Elizabeth Powell confesses to not having been entirely comfortable with life on the road, the EP’s steely, oscillating and unfussy approach is testament to a band that have forged their sound from the blood, plecs and tears of coughing up goods night after night in crazy, anonymous bars and howling like banshees in occasionally hostile territories: hence the name: ‘Applause, Cheer, Boo Hiss’. It’s confrontational without being provocative, immediate without being in your face and noisy without making a complete racket. It’s there in Powell’s occasionally bookish, occasionally sexy, occasionally delirious and occasionally sleepy, woozy slur and in the rushing fizz of the New Wave breaks and beats. Tracks like ‘Speak To Me Bones’ take a hard and gruelling gothic-grunge turn whilst songs like ‘Summer Special’, ‘All My Friends and the disgracefully pretty, ‘Young Bridge’ cough-up the kind of waspish, laconic dreaminess typified by older girly-bands like Elastica, Sleeper, and Juliana Hatfield. And what makes it all the more seductive is the fact we haven’t got the foggiest idea what the hell she’s singing about, only the fact that she swears and talks dirty from time to time.
Radiohead, The Strokes, Jeff Buckley – it’s all in there but meted out with such unscientific abandon that the whole thing occupies a sweaty, untidy and variously inspired niche of its own.
Existential rock for the masses. Consider those ‘jams’ well and truly kicked out.