Low-key emotional intensity abounds in Elizabeth Powell’s stark, sketch-like reveries, and the new album’s few-frills production exposes just how gut-wrenching their songwriting can be.
Tucked away almost halfway through Land of Talk’s fourth album, Indistinct Conversations, is a question that’s also a revelation. Many songwriters try to grab listeners right away; Elizabeth Powell, the long-running Canadian band’s sole constant member, goes for the stream-of-consciousness, the gnomic, the curiously brambled. Emotions aren’t on Powell’s sleeve, they’re simmering under the skin. Or, as the Land of Talk singer and chief songwriter asks on “Love in 2 Stages,” a minor-key meditation on romantic vicissitudes heated up by syncopated stabs of keyboard, “I dig deep, why don’t you?”
Indistinct Conversations is a testament to the tattered ideal that digging deep—for its own sake, regardless of the short-term outlook—can be worthwhile in the long run. After a mostly forgotten alt-rock debut as ELE_K* in 2003, Powell began turning heads with Land of Talk’s first effort, 2006’s wiry and thrilling Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP. A succession of generally strong albums followed, each with high-profile collaborators and sensitive personal backstories. 2008’s Some Are Lakes was produced by then-boyfriend Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. 2010’s Cloak and Cipher featured Arcade Fire’s Jeremy Gara and followed Powell’s vocal-cord struggles. After a long break, 2017’s Life After Youth, with guests Sharon Van Etten and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, was a musical homecoming informed by Powell’s father suffering a stroke. Land of Talk never quite shone as brightly as those other acts. But they persisted.
With Indistinct Conversations, Powell’s private world is once again in flux, but this time there are no boldfaced names to dominate the narrative. Finally back in a Land of Talk groove after retreating from the music industry between Cloak and Cipher and Life After Youth, Powell has also begun identifying publicly as a non-binary femme, using the pronouns she/they. Aside from a few Montreal jazz-scene friends, the only collaborators here are Land of Talk drummer/keyboardist Mark “Bucky” Wheaton and bassist Christopher McCarron, who both co-produced the album with Powell at Wheaton’s home. Built mainly from Powell’s knotty acoustic guitar explorations and lyrical musings that feel like fragments from an exceptionally perceptive diary, it’s the most satisfying Land of Talk album yet.
The few-frills production exposes just how gut-wrenching Powell’s songwriting can be. Gaslighting is by now a familiar concept, but first single “The Weight of That Weekend” traces the contours of a toxic encounter with devastating aplomb. “Always come at me from a different angle/Make me think I don’t understand/How I’m feeling,” Powell begins, parceling out the words just so. The Americana-ish folk-rock backdrop is understated, enlivened by a smattering of French horn, but the emotional stakes are high enough for Powell to add later, “This is a prayer for love.”
Low-key emotional intensity abounds in these stark, sketch-like reveries. “I feel it like an empty hand,” Powell sings on the coyly titled “Compelled,” describing their lust for a lover who is with someone else—someone unworthy. In their cool deadpan, the evocative comparison sounds as old as time. On “Diaphanous,” the jolt comes with the playful opening rhyme (the title phrase with “half of us”) and then again with the dynamic shift as cascading drums join the gnarled electric guitar and fluttery saxophone. The album may be home-recorded, but the performers are road-tested. The last words we hear from Powell, on the penultimate, acoustic-strummed “Now You Want to Live in the Night,” are devastating in their plainspoken vulnerability: “Have I lost the feeling/What’s wrong with me?”
It’s always felt difficult for Land of Talk fans to explain why this particular relatively down-the-middle indie-rock project was so good. As singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Powell’s voice was always appealing, off-kilter, and expressive, but there was never an unmistakable calling card, like the singular yawp of Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan or the life-or-death majesty of Big Thief. Perhaps the unhurried, existential sighs of Kurt Vile were closer all along. And while this album’s interstitial speech fragments wind up sounding like the guys at the bar during a live solo set, and “Look to You (Intro)” and “Look to You” would’ve been better as a single, soaring opus, these are minor complaints. Indistinct Conversations finally burrows into Land of Talk’s dormant identity, as a band willing to wait out passing trends and realize its own promise. Another flash of psychological truth comes on “A/B Futures,” a rare fist-pumper on this preternaturally subdued record. “You need someone to care for,” Powell insists. “Hey, make that me.”
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