Pretty Girls Make Graves - 'Good Health' (Matador)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Looking back on a debut record can be a fantastic use of our need to wallow in nostalgia. Did the signs on what has now become memory lane ever really point to what would happen once these initial stages were abandoned and the band was left to blossom?
In the case of Pretty Girls Make Graves and 'Good Health' as a tool for tracing their evolution, the makings of a good band are pretty clear to see, even if their style has hardly changed beyond recognition. But in the UK, this is the first time you'll have heard this unless you're a fan of importing things from over the pond. Some of us weren't paying attention, obviously. After letting this sink in, we have to wonder why that was.
Whilst we've retained an admiration for the Pretty Girls, this is the missing piece in the puzzle, the sound of a band setting out with nothing to lose, and every point to prove. The kind of feeling you can only get with a debut. The kind of feeling that starting with 'Speakers Push the Air' (''Do you remember when the music meant something?') generates brilliantly. So, we're intrigued. You try and grab a piece of 'If You Hate Your Friends, You're Not Alone' to analyse as it whizzes past, but everything in the song is happening so fast you just can only sit back, hold firm, as it leads you towards 'The Getaway', still probably the best melody they've ever written.
Quite so impressive is the opening half of the record that there is a small danger of falling in love a little too quickly, signing over our lives to the cause and having to overlook some subsequent flaws due to misplaced loyalty. It is a debut, after all, so try and remember the parts of the story you already know and not be disappointed when the momentum, lyrical prowess that makes up Andrea Zollo's impressive wail and ability to craft yet another niggling, brilliantly nervy guitar line wanes in the second half. 'Ghosts In The Radio' won't grab you like 'Sad Girls Por Vida'; 'Bring It On Golden Pond' might be sonically entertaining but its anti-establishment stance ('All we are is trying not to fall into line') will sound a little weary in comparison with what we perceive to be a genuine call to arms in 'Speakers...'. You know as well as we do that they pull it off in the end.
There's a whole other EP tagged on to focus in that little clearer, and admirably scrappy and lively as it is (particularly 'Modern Day Emma Goldman'), the proper burst on to the scene of the band's self-titled debut four-tracker sounds a little out of place stuffed at the end of the album, like reading a whole book but omitting its first chapter. The degree to which skills were honed even between these two recordings is most apparent in the ability to craft a stunning tune, something on this evidence that wasn't properly dabbled in until the opening twenty minutes of 'Good Health'.
Luckily, however, as anyone who's witnessed their feral abandon since, it's not something they've ever let go.
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