Since 2007, the members of West Coast post-punk trio Grass Widow have exuded a group dynamic so seamless their otherworldly three-part harmonies and disjointed melodies sound effortless. But such grace doesn’t come easily. In line with the kind of radical politics pushed around their hometown of San Francisco, Grass Widow proudly self-identify as a leaderless band with a democratic songwriting process. When that type of consensus decision-making works, it’s beautiful. But consensus is never an easy process: individuals often end up making compromises to accommodate the shared values of the group as a whole. With her solo project Ruby Pins, Grass Widow drummer/singer Lillian Maring has stepped away from those limitations to spend time inside her own head and embrace her darker creative impulses. The result, written over three years and self-recorded with a laptop and one microphone, is a haunting collection of cryptic pop songs.
Maring’s autonomous vision shines through its abstractions; through its way of shaping spooked moods with heavy, cyclical drumbeats, shadowy surf riffs, and enigmatic wordless vocal hooks. Like in Grass Widow, the vocals on Ruby Pins are consistently low in the mix, veiled by home-recording hiss, making space for Maring’s psychedelic guitars and spiraling keys to sing the stories just as much as her voice does. Sometimes, Maring self-harmonizes for double-tracked parts, deadpanning like a girl-gang of one (“Gagging on the Obvious”) while at other points she sings woozy pop melodies (“Lost Art”). The words are rarely audible, but it always sounds like she’s trying to tell us something.
The album starts with the dim and distant chugging riffs of “Chariot”, an opener that sounds like a moving vehicle racing away. “My Friends Are Insane” could be a sketch pulled from Maring’s diary; her words are urgently plainspoken over echoes of murky instrumentals. “Girl Store” is similarly arcane and downcast, a collage of what sounds like recorded conversations pieced together. A recurring high-pitched voice sounds like a little girl lost in a toy store: “ha ha ha,” she hums over shuffling circus-like percussion. “Begotten” contains barely any lyrics, but is one of the most entrancing tracks on side B; a nightmarish four-minute jam that starts out with a mess of indecipherable words drowned out by a meandering minor-chord guitar line and speeding percussion. It'd make a good soundtrack for a haunted fun house.
In a recent interview with East Bay Express surrounding the release of Ruby Pins, Maring slowly unveiled some of the heavy baggage she was dragging around while writing lines like, “No day is the right day to die/ No day is the right day to die” on "Chameleon". In 2010, she lost her boyfriend to cancer, and writing Ruby Pins was one way of grieving. While it's hard to forget such a tragic story, it’s also not entirely necessary to know in order to sense the surreal, ever-present gloom of Ruby Pins. In fact, the obscured lyrics (the record doesn’t come with a lyric sheet) almost prevent Maring's personal life from driving the narrative of her debut. It further proves, though, that the most intrinsically human records are ones an artist makes entirely for herself.
