Pretty Girls Make Graves has faltered in its new album, and not just in designing the cover art.

The Seattle quintet is known for studio-polished, intelligent-yet-angsty emo rock. Over the years, the band became kind of a poor-man’s At the Drive In. It may sound emo, but in a creative, meter-busting, trend-breaking way.

But every band has to grow, and it seems like Pretty Girls Make Graves is trying a little too hard to create a new name for itself. Last time everyone checked, emo died a few years ago, and Pretty Girls’ new album Elan Vital says so.

Unfortunately, a lot of the band’s flavor and songcraft was encased in the sinking genre. When branching out, many of the new songs sound insincere and contrived.

The melodies aren’t as strong, and most don’t pull you in like the highlights of The New Romance did.

With a few exceptions, mainly the tuneful workers’ anthem “”Parade”” about going on strike and the awkward masterpiece “”Pictures of a Night Scene,”” the songs run together like different flavors of ice cream in a cone.

“”Pictures of a Night Scene”” is a valuable piece of Pretty Girls’ history because it features a different singer, the band’s bassist Derek Fudesco. Gone is the lyrical but sometimes annoying Andrea Zollo, who is replaced with off-tune whispery vocals on top of banging drums, minimalistic piano and chaotic saxophone.

For any other song, his plainly untrained vocals would fall flat, but the flavor on “”Pictures”” compliments the sound. Nevertheless, Pretty Girls fails to capture the musicianship and groundbreaking emotion of this song in the album and falls just a little flat of what it strived to be.