Land Of Talk - Some Are Lakes Review

Eight lanes wide, the highways seem to stretch forever. Through the over-populated city, the under-populated cars lurch forward, inches at a time. What once must have been a healthy, functioning body is now riddled with parasites that are feeding off of a slowly dying host. It takes forever to go nowhere. I'm wasting my days on the same roads, mindlessly changing lanes and stopping at endless red lights.

The people I used to know here have changed. It's like recognizing the face of a stranger, but not being able to place how you know them. I think of the way things used to be. Conversations we used to have. In some instances, a touch that at one time meant something completely different. With such infrequent exposure to them, my mind connects the encounters here in the this foreign place as points on one unbroken line, failing to take into account the many unknown changes that have separated then and now. Thinking about how it was and how I wish it could be wears me out....full text What James Brown said some 40 years ago is still very true today: It's a man's world. That's still true in music, as well. Pop music, for the past half century or more, has been dominated by one pretty pervasive phallic symbol: the guitar. Maybe it's surprising, then, that Elizabeth Powell stands out so much on this record.



Let us make no mistake: Some Are Lakes, the first full-length from Land of Talk, is certainly a guitar record, but not some kind of fret-tapping, lightspeed-shredding guitar record. Neither is it some kind of convenient pop contrivance where the inclusion of guitars was just incidental in the album's production. This is the kind of whiskey-induced guitar rock that you might expect to come from the regular band at your local bar, if the regular band at your local bar was really good.

...full text Elizabeth Powell, the lead singer of this three-piece Montreal indie-rock band, sounds marvelously self-assured on “Some Are Lakes” (Saddle Creek), its reverberant full-length debut. Her voice is alluring but firm, with just barely enough vulnerability to carry off a pledge like “I’ll love you like I love you/Then I’ll die,” which appears in the title track. She’s an equally strong guitarist, committed to the hazy-beautiful school of distortion but not averse to the odd brickbat riff. And where Land of Talk’s breakout EP, “Applause Cheer Boo Hiss,” sounded a bit overheated at times, “Some Are Lakes” conveys a rewardingly lived-in feeling....full text