Pretty Girls Make Graves have been touring relentlessly since they formed in late 2001 and the results are clearly evident in their second album, The New Romance. Their sophomore album emerges a lot stronger than 2002's Good Health and shows how far Pretty Girls have come as a band.
When the Murder City Devils disbanded, their bassist Derek Fudesco got together with his Seattle, Wash., buddies from other bands, Andrea Zollo, Nathen Johnson, Nick DeWitt and J Clark of the now-defunct Minnesota band Kill Sadie. Together they released an EP under the name Pretty Girls Make Graves. The brash, loud, eponymous EP featured a ferocity reminiscent of old Fugazi albums while relying heavily on call-and-response style singing between Fudesco and Zollo.
Pretty Girls delivered their first full album in 2002 with producer Phil Ek. The eclectic and often disjointed Good Health showed a lot of promise from the band, but displayed a lack of real cohesion or composition.
They seem to have found solutions to compositional problems on their latest album, The New Romance. The band demonstrates a unity that could only have been the result of their non-stop touring with such bands as Alkaline Trio and the Blood Brothers. There is a sense of knowledge of each other's' abilities not previously displayed, providing the new album with a tighter, more complete feel.
The call-and-response has largely been abandoned, and instead Zollo has been given free-range to show her stuff. And she does. The strength of Andrea's voice could lead to comparisons to Garbage, but the band prefers not to be compared to Sleater-Kinney or Kelly Osbourne.
The album starts off softly, waiting a bit before finally kicking in with Zollo's high-intensity wailing that marks a Pretty Girls album. The songs feature the familiar combination of calm, relatively simple guitar moments followed by quick, loud riffs while Zollo sings to out her lung capacity. This time, however, both the soft and the strong parts connect perfectly.
The themes of the album include drug use, love and also the non-stop touring the band has experienced, as Andrea declares in \A Certain Cemetery."" She sings, ""Cities sometimes blend together/ And it feels we've been away forever."" The simple guitar riffs are strong when they need to be, and Andrea's voice is used properly. These final three tracks come close to capturing the intensity and urgency of the EP, while displaying a level of skill not previously seen from the band.
The New Romance is a complete album from a unified band that knows what it wants to do: rock out.
