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Were the Land of Talk an actual location, it would probably be at the forks of the Bay of Serendipity and the Straits of Calamity. The Montreal-based trio led by songwriter Elizabeth Powell leads an existence at once charmed and cursed.

The group has been on near-perpetual international tour since their 2006 debut EP, Applause Cheer Boo Hiss, alerted high-profile music blogs to Powell's evocative vocals and febrile guitar leads.

Their reputation was confirmed by the more lustrous but still boisterous sound of the full-length Some Are Lakes, released in October and produced by Wisconsin musician Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, whose brooding album was one of 2008's most widely acclaimed indie-music debuts. And thanks to long-standing friendships, Powell became the latest female vocalist to come on board the indie juggernaut that is Broken Social Scene, a line of succession that includes Amy Millan (Stars), Emily Haines (Metric) and Feist.

Yet Powell also has had to cope with departures that left her Land of Talk's sole founder standing – or not, as when she sprained an ankle on stage in New York this fall.

There have been label disappointments, costly tour cancellations and a chronic vocal problem that is forcing Powell into hospital for polyp-removal surgery later this month. Land of Talk's three concerts this week – in Guelph, Ont., Toronto and Friday night at the Queen's University Grad Club in Kingston, Ont. – making up for no-shows in September, will be the last for a while.

“Like anything, you have to roll with the punches or get pummelled,” says Powell, a tousle-headed 28-year-old known as Lizzie to her friends.

The lineup changes in particular, she acknowledges, could have been murder on a three-piece group known for its intensely interlocking stage dynamic. “There were definitely some rough patches where I felt disconnected from the songs and even the band.” But new bassist Joe Yarmush and drummer Andrew Barr have since “rekindled that fire.”

The oscillations between bright and dark spots in Land of Talk's career mirror its music, founded on the sour-and-sweet blend of Powell's spiky, dissonant guitar with her plaintive voice, as if Kim Gordon of post-punk band Sonic Youth had the wounded twang of Louisiana country-rock balladeer Lucinda Williams. Powell's lyrics, too, hover in a twilight zone between Eros and Thanatos.

On Some Are Lakes' title track, for instance, where another songwriter might have been content with “I'll love you as long as I live,” she swerves into the hairpin “I'll love you like I love you, then I'll die.”

In this, she picks up on a cut-off 1990s strand from near-forgotten bands such as the Throwing Muses or Spinanes, who probed for a tough-but-not-macho feminine rock voice by more complex strategems of difference than the shock tactics of the riot-grrrl movement identified with Hole or Bikini Kill.

Powell comes by such awareness rather naturally, as her mother Valerie is a lifelong activist, most recently as the Green Party candidate in Ontario's Simcoe County – and further back, to throw in another duality, was North America's first female alligator wrestler. The family lived in rural Moonstone near Barrie, Ont., where Powell nurtured her imagination in the woods and making up radio plays with her brother Gray (now an actor in Toronto).

In her teens they moved to Guelph, where she fell in with the fast-growing and fertile music scene that would produce bands such as Royal City and the Constantines. She credits the feminist alt-rockers she looked up to there – and in 1990s underground rock in general – with showing her how music could accommodate more multiple viewpoints.

“I think I'm always confused and fascinated by our society's type of worship of the self – of which I am more than guilty – paired with an obvious need for social change through political activism,” she says. “So, at once, I've got heartache and personal problems intermingling with thoughts on political/global issues floating around in my head. … Love songs are great, but there is a lot more than love that can break someone's heart and spirit.”

She got a harder education in self-sufficiency after moving to Montreal in her early 20s, when a solo career under the sobriquet Ele_K soured under music-business manipulations that pushed her to soften her sound and sex up her image. “People, usually men, will take advantage of a woman who doesn't know her own worth.” As for her own future, after rest and recuperation from her operation, there will be more Land of Talk and Broken Social Scene tours and recordings, as well as her bluegrass side project Sister Brother, in which she plays her first instrument, the fiddle. Otherwise, she's not sure. “I'm hitting a bit of a second puberty, it feels like,” she says. “A lot of my former wants and ideas of success have been modulating into one giant question mark.”

But wherever Powell and Land of Talk head next, it surely won't be by a straight and narrow path.