Marshalling the muddled and seemingly distracted forces of late dub, emo-punk, and cheek chewing rock and roll, Pretty Girls failed to bring such urgency and anthemic power to the stage. Being the birthday for the band’s co-progenitor, Derek Fudesco, the band came out of the gate with spit and abandon, but seemed to level off somewhere in the middle of their first song.
Driven forward by the sheer virtuosity of their drummer, their songs fell into the daft rhythmic helping of angst and clouded romance, bodies at once subdued and self-consciously ecstatic. The lead singer, Andrea Zollo, did her best to wield the mystery, and momentum of their earlier studio successes (Good Health 2002, New Romance 2003), but failed to capture that range in her vocals. Quite honestly, I don’t see where the Sleater-Kinney or Bikini Kills comparisons come in. The microphone Zollo held up in the desperate atmosphere of the room was less a defiant torch and more a cinder from the neo-gothic nights of the mid to late nineties.
Coming together for brief moments, Pretty Girls did manage to reveal the pop-confidence and cogency of their new direction. During the song, Pyrite Pedestal, they rode the tried and true horse of broken love and yesterdays lost, finding a commonality for their instruments as they rose and frayed together.
Although Zollo might of benefited from vocal support, the Keyboardist, Leona Marrs, remained a somewhat static and isolated element of the show. Raging from either sides of the stage, the lead and bass guitars failed to augment the performance as well, mostly cutting each other off and fighting for attention.
As for the audience, despite a small cove of pumping arms, outstretched hands, and skinny boys shaking off their thick framed glasses, the audience seemed generally in agreement with its complacency and semi-satisfaction. Sure they maintained the aesthetic of a convincing rock band (Zollo does know how to lean into a microphone), but the real question comes when you try to raise them to something greater.
Watching the tracking video shot of tree canopies over a road, I couldn’t help but think that Pretty Girls had given into that same dangerous and treacherous boredom that they admonish in a song like “All Medicated Geniuses.”. Where is the Elan Vitale, the vital energy? After all, a name like Pretty Girls Make Graves carries a certain metaphorical significance, whether it is from a Smith’s song or a Kerouac novel.
Judging from the on-state persona of Pretty Girls, I think they would like to believe that they are making some ironic and raking statement against the devastating powers of objectified beauty. Especially with the blunt encouragements like, “baby, you don’t have to be in a magazine.”
What it comes down to, however, is that this is no emergency. Pretty Girls added their sound to that long list of indie rock bands who settle off somewhere in the purgatory between an independent sound and the canned throb of a mainstream rock and roll escape.
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