Pitchfork

Is this female five-piece-- fresh off a tour with The New Pornographers, and having played with fellow Canadians as luminous as Hot Hot Heat and Jerk with a Bomb-- the sound of a baritone Kristin Hersh fronting an analog Ladytron with more heart? Not entirely; The Organ is more like Interpol meets The Shaggs. For example, the first song's only lyrics ("Oh goodness me/ We've got to meet/ I need someone to have fun") are superficial cousins of 'Pol's "I will surprise you sometime/ I'll come around/ When you're down." Another kinship between the two is that their extry-catchy, ridiculously replayable CDs ooze misery-guts. This here typist would pay top dollar to borrow Guy Pearce's time machine (that he used to salvage savages like a good whitey) and fly to the September 2002 night that The Organ opened for Matador's Fashed Four. The Organ's execution might be unsophisticated, but pulling off the refrain "I can see the hearts sinking" (barked like a priority item on an Ian Curtis wishlist) can't be beginner's luck.

Readers with cats named Steven Patrick who mark May 22 by killing uncles and using southpaw grammar, take note: Katie Sketch is Miss Moz, croon-floating through the proceedings like a burnished fop-sage. And before you knock the simplistic lyrics mostly about how the speaker has become desire's jalopy, remember that an amazing box set could be made just of versions of "Baby Please Don't Go" (start with Big Joe Williams, then AC/DC, then Them, etc). Savvy does surface, as "It's Time to Go" cleverly bemoans a beat scene's "la da da" songs with a "la da da" chorus (less chili-fistedly than Smog's "Where is the beauty that I once had? I hate songs with questions in them").

Befuddlingly, though, this six-songs-in-fourteen-minutes disc is difficult to dissociate from the 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead (which is no slam of the film's score by The Goblins and Dario Argento):

Maybe the bandname (which is supposed to refer to a Hammond X123 that Jenny Smyth plays like a beach-carnival spook-house soundtrack) invokes the film's barrage of disembowelin' courtesy of Vietnam-combat-photographer-turned-makeup-effects-ace Tom Savini.

Maybe the liner photograph of the band on a mall stairwell invokes the film's zombie-flecked mall setting.

Maybe the band's Canadian-ness is a contributing factor, as Dawn's central characters were trying to get to Canada, and the new remake was filmed there.

Dawn was dark pop, with its weird mix of audience-ingratiation and resulotionless nihilism, and as it lingered in theatres throughout 1979, two similarly dual-toned albums would surface whose cavernous minimalism is emulated by the buried, angular wedgework of The Organ's guitarist Deborah Cohen: Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and The Cure's Three Imaginary Boys (echoes of Siouxsie's Banshees, who dropped their first two during the 78/79 stretch, can also be detected). (And: The Smiths, major touchstones for The Organ, would peak just as Dawn's sequel, Day of the Dead, emerged in the mid-80s). Dawn even offers insight into why we get excited about new revisitations of these old, comfortable worlds: the film's few living hypothesize that the zombies come back to the mall because they mechanically recall its importance/centrality.

In addition to being moany and monosyllabic (like... zombies), The Organ's lyrics are about a woman being left too alone, just as Dawn was primarily about a woman (Gaylen Ross as the unforgettable Fran) resigned to being abandoned in a crapscape (though in accordance with the strangely conservative rules of supposedly chaotic apocalypse films, she must be pregnant or otherwise Maryfied/matriarchified-- true of even the recent 28 Days Later, the zombies of which pick up where the fast-moving undead of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video left off.) (And damn if Chris Eccleston isn't in both Later and that movie about Joy Division dying and coming back as zombies called The Happy Mondays.)

The Organ's Katie Sketch sings of being emotionally torn and rent, just as human skin in zombie hands pulls apart like fig newtons or salt water taffy ("There Is Nothing I Can Do" deals with either gore or innocence: the speaker is either cutting paper or herself).

The admittedly novice rhythm section plods like those hobbly old-school zombies, which can make the band sound like it's decomposing or about to crumble apart. Perhaps a producer will tighten and polish them for their full-length Mint debut, but, like with B-horror, their amateurishness doesn't eclipse their fabulousness.

The final song is the slow jam all zombies should woo and coo to: "No One Has Ever Looked So Dead". How could the 25th anniversary version of Dawn neglect this track which so inimitably befits how both of the film's couples break up because one participant blossoms into a lurching blue-green cannibal corpse? (Good luck finding a more Gothic man-love scene than the one in which Ken Foree waits by the bed to shoot Scott Reiniger when he rises.) Sinking Hearts stands urgently recommended for anyone who has ever considered eating a little of their lover.