Land of Talk - Performances
Saddle Creek Records
Released October 13th, 2023
Neither precious nor grandiloquent, Land of Talk’s newest full-length - Performances - strips away any air of frivolity to deliver their most direct, cathartic, and devastatingly personal record to date.
Remembering making songs on her 4-track recorder as young as 14, Land of Talk’s Lizzie Powell describes Performances as “a love letter to my teenage self, by being more vulnerable and doing all the production myself”. As the creative force behind the project, Lizzie notes that Performances marks a new-found joy in challenging preconceived notions of what Land of Talk can and should sound like: “I would write demos and think, ‘Oh, that doesn’t really sound like Land of Talk’…but then I realized that I’m Land of Talk”.
The stand-out track and lead single, “Your Beautiful Self”, is a nuanced meditation on self-love. The track begins with simple piano chords and vocals - both in an eerily low register - before spiraling upward into something more upbeat, more hopeful. Lizzie Powell’s plaintive tone soon flips into what seems like activating self-talk, speaking inward to a love-weary soul. “Hopeful I / I want to hopefully / just stay on my side… if I believed I could just say / take a deep breath / let it out / show the love in”.
The album features several instrumental tracks, each holding their own as essential aspects of the larger vision. Intro (High Bright High)’s cyclical electric piano sets a sanguine tone for the album, while other instrumentals such as Clarinet Dance Jam and album closer “Pwintiques” allow space to digest, decompress, and connect the dots.
My favourite track is “Marry It”, one that’s devastatingly vulnerable while maintaining a healthy distance from literal storytelling. When discussing Marry It, Lizzie admits “I listened back to the album recently and I cried, really cried, when this song came on. It’s alive and it really moves me.” It is, indeed, alive. The song takes on new shapes and forms on every listen, able to be interpreted as both an expression of loss and an enigmatic celebration of growth. “...I miss your laugh around life / half of us moving on / I didn’t notice then / so I don’t like my family / feel it out later on / cause I didn’t notice then”.
The album’s technical production elevates the intimate themes and instrumentation of Performances, at once delicate and self-assured. As the first album that Lizzie created fully themselves, it certainly doesn’t show in quality of tones they captured - at certain moments it feels as though Lizzie is singing from inside your mouth, and the percussion is being played directly onto your ear drum. Every single aspect of each song exudes intentionality, from the oft-breathy “1, 2, 3, 4” to entice themself to begin, all the way to each clever song-end.
The strength of Performances lies in its ability to shed unnecessary embellishments, while never over-simplifying. It gives voice to the paradoxes of a lived experience that is imperfect and beautiful, creating space to consider what it really means to love and be loved.
- Penelope Stevens
