Land of Talk

About Land of Talk:

“Calming Night Partner,” the title track of Land of Talk’s forthcoming EP, is a tender song full of violence. Elizabeth Powell’s fuzzy, ’90s-inflected guitar strums quietly over a starry blanket of noise while they sing a series of terrifying questions: “Was it a knife fight? Was it a lifetime? Did she wear you down, wear you in, sacrificial? Did she tear you right down the middle?”

That strange, dissociative marriage of sound and words sums up the alchemy of Calming Night Partner : the music creates a safe harbor where painful and traumatic experiences can be safely explored. It’s a familiar mood in the post-COVID era; Powell is using seclusion and privacy to build up a sense of self that the outside world seems intent on destroying.

“We were recording in the middle of the pandemic,” Powell says. “Everyone was struggling, and all we wanted to do when we were in the studio was just be friends and be there for each other. The studio wound up being our safe house.” The EP was recorded with a familiar team — Mark “Bucky” Wheaton on drums; Chris McCarron, Pietro Amato and Erik Hove on brass, with Amato also on keys — on a Canadian pandemic assistance grant that required them to record five songs in ten days. (Powell wasn’t even initially sure the EP would be released: “I thought this was just going to be a secret release that the band never shared! I don’t know what I was thinking.”) The resulting “family reunion” buoys up the difficult emotions on Calming Night Partner with a palpable warmth.