A couple of weeks ago, while discussing Marnie Stern's In Advance of the Broken Arm, a friend asked who played that breathless, finger-tapping, Energizer guitar. It was a telling moment, a weird backhanded compliment: For some reason, folks still don't expect a woman to shred. Well, dudes, Marnie Stern does-- and how.
She does just about everything here, handling guitars, vocals, synths, songwriting, and production. But no one's an island: Hella's Zach Hill plays drums, an addition that brings more muster to Stern's debut. Hill also chips in a pair of keys, bass, and production. Extra bass and even more organ/key duties go to John-Reed Thompson, who engineered and mixed much of In Advance. But despite the extra hands, it's Stern's fingerprints that matter.
Beyond pure technical skill-- almost more impressively, really-- Stern sounds like nobody else. She told The New Yorker that she ostensibly didn't listen to "good music" (as she calls it) until she was 23. At that time, Sleater-Kinney were her watershed; she eventually found Hella, Boredoms, Melt-Banana. Don Caballero reportedly inspired her finger-tap technique (as well, perhaps, as her lengthy song titles). You'll hear bits of those bands across the 13 tracks-- that S-K guitar interplay and lilt revved with caffeine and turned into a 60-string molotov. The biggest unspoken presence for my buck, though, is Mick Barr, who wields a similar I-am-a-rock feel in Orthrelm, Ocrilim, Octis, other "O"'s, and his Shred Earthship collaboration with Hill. Beyond the ubiquitous Hella drummer, Barr and Stern also share a propulsive buoyancy, affixing emotion to flat-out, jaw-dropping chops.
Unlike Barr, Stern's seeking pop concision. I caught him rattling out a long solo guitar piece at the Whitney at Altria a month or two ago-- if it'd been Stern, she would've subdivided the real-time loop 10 times and added a vocal chirp. That's another thing: Her voice is a major component to her practice, layered as many times as her guitar. She can sound a bit like Deerhoof's Satomi-- the way she rides atop the guitars, a stone skipping across water. But the chants are more next-room distant, gauzy. Structurally, she sets up her own call-and-response (musically and lyrically), her sing-talk style cutting across the strings like a rogue auctioneer or cheerleader.
But talk about front-loading: In Advance roars out of the gate with "Vibrational Match", "Grapefruit", and "Every Single Line Means Something", each showing Stern at her best. At those moments, her playing and dynamics are complimented wonderfully by Hill's horse-racing drums, as she strums over her own amplification and tripped "adjust your perceptions" lyrics (in one spot, someone crawls to a gutter with broken knees). In that sense, if "Every Single Line Means Something" is taken as a commentary on every vocal bit and modulating Van Halen guitar line, Stern's work becomes a true-blue head fuck.
Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark. Let's use another song title as an instruction: "Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!!" Yeah, perhaps the palette could be a tad more various; the addition of some breaks or other dynamics would help. As is, by the end of the record, the insouciance has faded a bit, the shredding lost some of its stream. For example, take a look at "This American Life"-- ingredients that sounded brilliant elsewhere, dodder a bit and yearn for variation. Oddly, as the song titles get more intriguing-- "Letters From Rimbaud", "Plato's Fucked-Up Cave"-- the songs themselves are less interesting.
An album needs pacing. For instance, Grindstone, the recent Shining outing scatters weirdness into various baskets, creating a super slow, imploded central shift and ultimately, well, a diamond. Here Stern keeps stabbing, and so the steam lessens. Strange then that Barr can do something like OV, looping endlessly, without it getting a snore. So, maybe she needs to extend some of the riffs? Perhaps there's too much going on-- the glass is empty, the glass is half full...
There's a stand-out section where Stern nails this sorta next-big-thing. Check the link/transition between "Logical Volume", a feedbacking chant that stands in place a bit before moving into an almost elegiac realm, and the up-tempo "Absorb Those Numbers". Hear how it soars? It's a delicate balance, and she pulls it off remarkably well. On the latter she intones, "As your breath catches up from where you began": The present catching up to its past and circling back to a shared beginning. Here, too, she showcases different textures of her voice, turning the guitar into an almost jazz sax behind her catchy, modulated hooks. At these moments, regardless of the late-period bomb, you know for fucking sure Stern has it-- a charisma and technique that already distinguishes her as pure Technicolor in a glutted, black-and-white scene.
