Pretty Girls Make Graves and S Prcss

Any band that’s named after a Smiths song can’t be half bad. OK, I take that back — Handsome Devil sucks ass, but Pretty Girls Make Graves rocks. The group copped its moniker from Morrissey (who swiped it from Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums), but its music has little to do with navel-gazing Britpop. Fortunately, this Seattle quintet also ignores the standard-issue Northwest influences — metal sludge and riot-grrl power — and forges a sound that crackles with an energy of its own. The promise of last year’s Good Health EP pays off on the recently issued full-length The New Romance. Too complex and smart to be easily digested, PGMG challenges its audience with songs that change shape as they progress, resisting the crutch of memorable choruses and other such trickery.

— Harkness

When the trio then known as S Process started to work on its debut record, none of its members lived in the same city, so they would send one another cassettes packed with glimmers of songs-to-be. In 2002, they convened in Philadelphia to fashion those parts into a whole and dubbed the resulting tunes MNML — minimal without the I’s and A’s. In keeping with that staunch anti-vowel platform, the band is now known as S Prcss. Calling it MNML is somewhat misleading. Rather, it’s art-punk involving electronic flourishes, with both ready-made dance beats and sing-along hooks, even if the synchronized singing involves the recitation of obtuse lyrics. More than anything, MNML is a testament to the integrity of the hardworking men and women at our United States Postal Service, who proved their ability to deliver packages to addresses composed entirely of consonants.

— Bishop