Halfway through "Proof of Life", from Marnie Stern's fourth album, The Chronicles of Marnia, she makes an admission she's never made on record before: "I am running out of energy." Her voice is uncharacteristically low, her explosive finger-tapping guitar conspicuously absent. Instead, a piano blocks out melancholy chords over a drum fill that sounds like boulders cascading down a hillside. "Give me a sign," she pleads, exhausted. "Give me a sign."
Two minutes later, she has moved on to a song called "Hell Yes". If Marnie Stern has a cycle, it's this: Fall down, then pick yourself back up-- and up! And up! And UP! Her music-- a frantic, precise sound that can resemble excerpts of Van Halen looped at high speeds-- combats bottomless self-doubt with limitless hope. Nearly every song in her catalog is some reiteration of the idea that even you can do it, probably with an exclamation point. Talking to The N**ew Yorker about her guitar technique in 2011, she said, "Tapping is actually a way of cheating, since you're using both of your hands." Then, like a guru trying to explain the simplicity of her secret to a talk-show audience, she added, "It makes things a lot easier!"
The Chronicles of Marnia is an extension of the transition she started on 2010's Marnie Stern toward a more controlled, more subdued sound. Not that any of her music is a good reference point for "controlled" or "subdued." Marnia still sounds like Marnie Stern: aggressive, busy, bright, with death-defying highs and perilous lows. But where she often used to shriek, now she sometimes sighs, and the frantic, start-stop quality of her early songs has given way to something more like a swoon.
Part of the relative calm on Marnia has to do with personnel change. Until now, she's worked with drummer Zach Hill, first of Hella and most recently of Death Grips; on Marnia, she's backed by Kid Millions, who mostly plays with Brooklyn drone and psych-rock fixture Oneida. Millions plays like a firework display: Big, dazzling and dangerous, but very well coordinated. Hill's approach-- intoxicating as it is-- is more like a nailbomb in a concrete-block basement. Compared to the sway of Marnia, the sputtering sound of 2007's In Advance of the Broken Arm has as much groove as a three-legged race.
For all her positive mental attitudes, Marnie Stern's music is intensely vulnerable, a quality that has always been hinted at in her music but that Marnia makes much clearer. Even in the midst of its most festive moments, like the conga-line rhythms of "Noonan", she's drawn to piercing, almost childlike questions: "Don't you want to be somebody?" Just as she and Millions start to build the vicious "You Don't Turn Down", the drums flare out and the curtain drops. "'What took you so long?' they said out loud," she sings alone. "'Got to get obsessed and stay there now'"-- an image of an artist embarrassed that they aren't capable of kicking as much ass as someone else would like. But the root of Stern's weakness is also the root of her power: The impression that she could fall apart at any second wouldn't be nearly as dramatic if she wasn't moving so dangerously fast.
Under all the noise on Marnie Stern’s albums there has always been a need for some kind of quiet: For the thoughts to stop cycling, for the silence to take over, for the danger, real or imagined, to be replaced by a sense of safety. Though her inspirations tend mostly toward mid-1980s triumph rock and the more agitated end of indie (Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Hella), her most original music sounds like snack-sized versions of Indian raga or Philip Glass: by building intensity until it reaches a peak so humming and hypnotic that the busyness of it turns into some kind of mystical autopilot. It makes sense that her lyrics have been strewn with the kind of inspirational talk that usually applies to athletes: Her music is the runner's high, the moment when physical intensity turns into an almost meditative state.
Until now, Stern has lived an artistic double life, treated like a sensitive singer-songwriter for her persona and some posthuman techno-wizard for the way she plays a guitar. On every album since her debut, these two parts of her have come closer together. On Marnia, they’re one. "Close your eyes," she sings over the grand, noisy waltz of "Still Moving". "Nobody knows when it's gonna be. Nobody knows when it's gonna be. Close your eyes," she repeats, consoling, for the first time in song, someone other than herself.
"Maturity" is a hackneyed trope in songwriting, not to mention a word that doesn't quite suit a grown woman who periodically blogs under the name Marnie's fagina. But Marnia isn't the single touch that shatters, it's the long, steady stare that gives way to embrace. Not obsession, as she puts it on "You Don't Turn Down", but something deeper, solemn, and more lasting.
