Pretty Girls Made Graves

We weren’t the biggest or most dedicated of PGMG fans; we didn’t know what Andrea Zollo (the only member we knew by name) was singing most of the time and couldn’t say things like, “Yeah! Speakers Push the Air!” two seconds into the song. But damn, we liked the band’s punky, catchy, jump-around syncopation. We liked that Andrea, when we’d seen PGMG live, was a wilder Liza Minnelli, a tamer Karen O. So on Saturday it was a little sad to see the band leave the stage for the second-to-last time—we caught the early Neumos show—and hear Andrea’s echoing thank-yous to “Mom” and “friends” and everyone who’d ever bought a CD or a t-shirt.

For half an hour, it seemed PGMG was eager to be done with their first swan song, zipping through songs faster than we remembered them playing out on Good Health and The New Romance. (We never got into their last effort, Elan Vital, so whatever they played off that one went over our heads.) But then Andrea started chatting a bit between songs and the guitars and keys relaxed a bit. They played what more devoted fans would expect—most of which we bounced around to, thinking, Hey, we know this one. It’s the one about “our emergency.” Almost everyone took a turn helping the drummer bang his cymbals. Things got a touch chaotic. A small mosh pit formed at the stage’s lip. Then Andrea announced their last song and five minutes later they were gone. It was almost exactly a 60-minute set.

When the obligatory three-song encore (aided by opener Moon Rats’ singer/guitarist) was over, wild applause rose and quickly died out. Everyone filed out quietly. We can’t remember being at a band’s final show before, but this one seemed oddly anticlimactic. Maybe because they’d announced their breakup earlier this year, the show had been blithely billed as their final performance and people had long been mentally prepared. Or maybe because everyone there, like us, was a touch bitter that the show we’d just seen wasn’t really Pretty Girls Make Graves’ last show ever—it was really the first half of the last show ever. Despite what people will tell you, everyone wants to witness that last dying breath. (Some just wait too long to buy tickets to the event.)

Hopefully we’ll see Andrea—and Jay, Derek and Leona—on Seattle stages in some band’s shape or form in the near future.

Stay tuned for Seattlest Jack's take on Pretty Girls Make Graves' real final show.