Two standout local bands from decades past are returning to the stage and one is releasing a new album this year.
First, there’s Pretty Girls Make Graves. If you’re unfamiliar, they’re a post-punk group that signed to Matador Records after a few years of scorching success in Seattle. The band was known for intense live shows and are from an era of local music that’s mostly been forgotten. It’s a period of time I think of as the lost years of Seattle’s music scene.
More specifically, those years are between 1999-2004. It’s when bands like Vendetta Red, the Blood Brothers, Schoolyard Heroes, Kane Hodder, Murder City Devils and the Divorce, to name a few, were prominent in the local scene. It’s when you could walk into the Crocodile Cafe on a Tuesday night and catch the indie pop of Dolour and Aqueduct sharing a bill with the likes of harder groups such as The Fall of Troy and These Arms are Snakes.
Anyway, Pretty Girls Makes Graves consists of singer Andrea Zollo, bassist Derek Fudesco, drummer Nick Dewitt, keyboardist Leona Marrs, and guitarists J Clark and Nathan Thelen, the latter of which left the band in 2004. The group broke up in 2007 and recently announced it will be performing a reuinion set at the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas this October. The band is playing its 2003 record “The New Romance” in full during the festival.
So far the PGMG camp have only announced one reunion show. Fingers crossed for a local warm-up date at the Showbox, Neumos, Crocodile or any other club around town. And fingers double crossed this reunion means there will be some new music from PGMG soon.
The other local band that is getting back together are Olympia dance-rockers Gossip.
The group most recently reunited in 2019 for a reunion tour. This year’s reunion will be different that what happened five years ago because the group is releasing a new album. The record, titled “Real Power” will be released March 22 and was produced by Rick Rubin.
So far the group has only announced some European tour dates. Hopefully the group will remember its PacNW roots and play some shows around town. Until a local date is announced, we do have the band’s latest single “Crazy Again,” to hold us over (video above).
