by Anika Maculangan
Some Are Lakes (2008) is known as Land of Talk’s most definitive album. It’s the album our minds initially race to, whenever we think of the band. However, with their most recent album, Performances (2023), we are introduced to a newly fleshed out dimension, filled with more down tempo and choral decay. It seems, the band has graduated from their prior lounges of vibrato, and have now turned to more mature gamuts of syncopated pulsing — much fever-pitched. In earlier works, it feels like the band is still trying to establish their foundation, but with this one, it seems, they have found their formula. On a lot of the tracks the piano metamorphoses to various styles tonally and structurally. On songs like “Sitcom” we encounter a mixture of a synth-like midi and organ clavier. Putting these two forms in their own separate parts in the song, the composition is able to personify a plethora of different approaches. For tracks like “Your Beautiful Self,” the framework is more classic, placing more emphasis on the vocals, lusciously packed with heavy reverb.
Performances, from a listener’s perspective, poses as a self-portrait of the artist, as if they are writing their memoir, each song its own chapter. In these depictions of the self, we view the multiple contexts that make up the artist, with its many angles. It’s like being in one of those rooms where all the walls are made of glass, and are mirroring one another. You see yourself from nearly every prospect, and it’s terrifying, daunting even, but it allows you to see yourself from beyond your own eyes and ahead of what is just in front of you. The album emanates this bigger-than-life atmosphere, that you can observe even from how the wavelengths of sound seem to stretch out so far. The tracks pose as very grounded to reality, but somehow also evoke these elements of surrealism and fantasy.
Songs like “Clarinet dance jam,” which is mainly an instrumental, offer this inkling of transcendence, which is served to us in portions, one spoonful after the next. Shorter instrumentals like “August 13” have these drum loops that are denser than bass, making one feel like they are in a deep cave, where each drop of water creates a heightened echo. Meanwhile, on lyrical-based songs such as “Semi-Precious” there are meaningful refrains sung by Elizabeth Powell, “We can fade so somebody sees/I lost and found myself daily/Make the sunlight hit til’ it sleeps/And now that I feel a lot better/Help yourself to something you see,” dwelling on the growth observed between two people who are creating molds out of their shells in different paces.
For the dreamier tracks like “Fluorescent Blood” there is this mythical quality that adds to its aura of playfulness and glee. The vocals sound like singing coming from the other end of the line, through a telephone, accompanied by these twinkly organs. Powell keeps asking “Where did I go wrong?” conveying that feeling of constant rumination of whether or not we can go back to our past selves in order to fix things. Then, songs like “Marry It” come along, which questions purpose and intent in one’s life. In a way, it feels like Powell is going back to every single moment there is in history, nitpicking and analyzing them to the finest detail, examining the tendencies of human behavior.
In the lyricism, and even in the tonal effects, there is this keenness toward attention which Powell demonstrates. She throws a big bucket of paint on a large, blank canvas, creating a splash that is messy, yet feels measured and precise — with just the right amount of smudges to make it something that looks good both near and from afar. It’s the painting you hang up in your room — the one you delightfully wake up to see every morning to start your day. Each day, there is a new streak that appears on the sidelines of the frame, bleeding out onto the rest of the walls.