[review 2006: the disappointments]

When I first posted about Elan Vital way back at the beginning of the year, a couple of people wrote in to tell me I was nuts. And to some extent, those people were right; I clung to the early days a bit too strongly to see the merits of the latest Pretty Girls Make Graves album, and was perhaps guilty of wanting them to release another Good Health. Thus began a long journey to see if I’d given Elan Vital a fair shake. I listened to it, then listened to it again. Then I left it for a couple of months and forgot about the album. Then someone else would bring up Pretty Girls Make Graves and I’d re-read a bunch of reviews and plunge headlong into the album again, trying to figure out what I’d missed.

A revelation in the eight months since Elan Vital’s release: Andrea Zollo was not the only thing I liked about early Pretty Girls Make Graves. It is utterly fantastic when Zollo screams out the last lines of “By The Throat,” the final track off Good Health. But further examination reveals that she doesn’t actually scream that much on the album; “Speakers Push The Air” and “More Sweet Soul,” two of my favorite songs on the album, are actually pretty restrained by comparison. And actually, the argument doesn’t extend at all to The New Romance, where Zollo spends a lot of her time well below vocal-shattering levels of volume. And yet even the weakest tracks off The New Romance feel far sharper than anything off Elan Vital. It turns out the killer blow may not be Zollo’s vocal difficulties at all, but in fact the loss of guitarist Nathan Thelen. It’s hard to say just how much of the band’s early guitar acrobatics was Thelen’s responsibility and how much was due to surviving guitarist Jay Clark, but the aggressive, muscular and accomplished guitar-driven approach fell apart in his absence, leading to the new approach on Elan Vital.

And what of this approach? It just sounds emptier, for one. The dueling buzzsaw guitar ninja attack is extremely difficult to replace, and despite Leona Marrs’ best efforts, one keyboard simply doesn’t fill the soundstage nearly as well. The album sounds woefully underproduced even at the best of times, like “The Nocturnal House” and “Parade”; “Domino” is simply an embarassment when held up against early live versions of the same song, which managed to do far more with just the one extra guitar (and not even Thelen’s, but a fill-in from Les Savy Fav). “The Number” fares marginally better once the full arrangement kicks in, but the keyboard opening is out of place and the vocals are murky at best. In fact, Zollo’s vocals are hopelessly buried underneath unnecessary effects more often than not. Why? “Parade” makes it clear that Zollo can still sing; why mess around with a good thing?

The strongest song on Elan Vital is “Parade,” the gentlest labourer call to arms ever committed to tape. “Parade” is effective because it is so clearly the polar opposite to everything the band has done prior to 2004. But the rest of the album lacks similar conviction; there are a lot of songs that sound shoehorned into the new approach, and it simply doesn’t work. Again, “Domino” is an obvious point of failure, but so are “Wildcat,” “The Number” and “The Magic Hour.”

In the end, the single most damning thing about Elan Vital is that I gave it more chances than I do most albums, and I still can’t listen to the whole thing without getting bored or wanting to listen to something else. I can sit here and play Bad Music Writer all day long, but the long and the short of it is listening to Elan Vital is a chore. Why should I continue to waste my time?