It can be a difficult thing to own up to a crush. Love’s something else altogether – love, especially in these tiring, disillusioned days when we all need something to believe in, has a certain je ne sais quoi, a romance, a grandeur, a hint of Bohemian idealism, an indefinable style and élan. But crushes? Crushes are so shamefully immature.

Anyway, I’m a guy, and not yet a terribly old one (although some days it certainly feels that way) – and as such, you’d imagine that I’d experience my share of crushes (because boys are hopeless, &c, &c). In fact, though, these tend to be few and far between for me – I guess that it’s just not really in me to crush easily (and thank goodness for that!). However, before I am a ‘boy’ (or ‘guy’, or ‘male’, or whatever), I am a creature of society, and culture, and irony, and distance, and a rather self-consciously constituted one at that, and so it is that I feel quite comfortable in proclaiming an indie-rock crush, even as I deny my susceptibility to crushes of the more immediate variety, and so here we are: my official indie-rock crush of the moment is Andrea Zollo, lead shouter (and, these days, with the somewhat new direction taken by her band, sometime singer) of poised-on-the-cusp of greatness indie-rock outfit Pretty Girls Make Graves.

Ah, Pretty Girls Make Graves. Infamously (and obviously!) named after a classic Smiths song (a phrase which is always more or less tautologous, anyway, one way or another), possessed of a pedigree to die for, and with an extremely well-received pair of records behind them (their self-titled EP of 2001, and 2002’s wonderful follow-up long player, Good Health), this was surely a band going places. And indeed they proved to be, moving to independent super-label Matador for their release of their second full-length – and how!

Essentially, The New Romance sees Pretty Girls Make Graves still working in the same groove that they carved out for themselves with those earlier recordings: an energetic brand of indie-rock with punky leanings and the occasional emo inflection. Still present are Zollo’s insistent, passionate vocals (with occasional backing shouts from the other members of the band), the squalling yet clean guitars of Nathan Thelen and J Clark, the intelligent bass-playing of Derek Fudesco, the anchor of Nick Dewitt’s forceful drumming, the sparing but deliberate use of keyboards and samples, the unexpected tempo changes that somehow always make perfect sense, the back-and-forth song structures that build and surge and turn around upon themselves to create brilliant indie-rock quasi-anthems…

There is one, quite marked difference, though, which is that this album is both tighter and more expansive than its predecessor; whereas Good Health was distilled to its absolute essence in the form of 30 minutes of intense, full-tilt shoutalongs, The New Romance reveals a band far more willing to allow its music to breathe. Both as musicians and as song-writers, Pretty Girls Make Graves have always been plenty self-assured, but this time round, they’ve allowed themselves a broader palette with which to work, and the results, coupled with a more polished production sound (itself a mixed blessing for bands of this kind, although it works well on this album), are satisfying indeed.

Depending on how where you’re coming from in listening to this album, one of two songs is likely to stand out as the highlight. The first is lead single “This Is Our Emergency”, the most straightforwardly structured and melodic number on the album, and, by virtue of its possession of those qualities, also one of the most atypical. It’s a call to arms, carried forward by a force born of the integration of all of the instruments and crested by Zollo’s urgent, staccato (and, if you’re in the right mood, rather winsome) delivery, and also surprisingly subtle, given how immediately it hits the listener between the eyes. While it may leave older (and more ‘hardcore’) fans cold, it’s both musically substantial and remarkably zestful, and a whole lot of fun.

The other particularly striking song on The New Romance – and this is the one that pre-existing fans will probably respond more to – is “All Medicated Geniuses”, a fine example of the manner in which Pretty Girls Make Graves can imbue a deliberately stop-start tempo/rhythmic structure with enough dynamism and songcraft that the whole is actually enhanced – and, indeed, given an internal coherence – by this disconnection; the guitars stab and spiral, spurt and circle, while Zollo’s vocals do the same, and this frenetic layering is accented and augmented by Dewitt’s emphatic drumming. As with all of the more jagged, urgent numbers on this album, it has an unaffected vibrancy that complements the complexity of the instrumental arrangements, a complexity which is manifest both within each individual part, and in the instruments’ interplay with one another (in the end, it is these more frenetic numbers which really hit home, as effective as the record’s more stripped-back moments are, and even granted that there are no real weak spots on this album).

It’s traditional to compare Pretty Girls Make Graves to (a) Fugazi and (b) Sleater-Kinney, usually in that order, and although these aren’t perfect points of reference, nor are they a million miles away from the truth (it’s also telling that Les Savy Fav get props in the liner notes). On the evidence of The New Romance, though, it looks as if they may be moving more in the direction of latter-day (and sadly lamented) Dismemberment Plan, even if they’re still much more rooted in the punk/hardcore tradition than that latter (it’s also difficult to imagine Zollo, Dewitt, Fudesco, Thelen and Clark achieving – or even seeking – the kind of deconstructive almost-ironic attitude towards their own music perfected by the D-Plan over the course of Emergency & I and Change), and it will be fascinating to see the direction in which the band’s muse next takes them.

But anyway, the future is a foreign country, as someone once almost said, so for now, let it suffice to say that Pretty Girls Make Graves are simply the coolest and most exciting damn thing to have come around in recent memory, and showing all the signs of getting even better.

One day, this could be love.

Recommended: Yes