It’s been an uneven century for the electric guitar. But as synths and samplers gripped the late aughts by the scruff of the neck, Marnie Stern’s exuberant 2007 debut LP In Advance of the Broken Arm made a compelling case for the embattled ax with a freaky and frenetic sense of style. A punched-over hornet’s nest of finger-tapped polyrhythms, breakneck drums and bratty garage-punk vocals, it announced a shred-heavy indie rock renaissance and kicked off a string of critically lauded albums for the New York songwriter that carried on through 2013’s comparatively subdued and groove-forward The Chronicles of Marnia.
10 years later, a month after being dubbed one of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone, Stern is back with her first collection of new music in a decade. The cheekily titled The Comeback Kid finds the 45-year-old picking up right where she left off, serving us a heady mix of restless riffs and nervy rhythms that reveal the steady strokes of a seasoned songwriter. After years of painting by the numbers as a regular member of the 8G Band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers, the effervescent new record is a return to form for an artist ready to dive back into a more boundary-pushing sonic approach: “The sound is hard to hear, right? / You can’t take it,” she wails on the blistering single “Believing Is Seeing,” upping the ante with her trademark maximalism. “What if I add this! And this! And this!”
But it’s not all big additions on The Comeback Kid. While its singular collision of math-rock and post-punk is most cogently expressed at the top of the volume dial, Stern’s long-anticipated follow-up continues a trajectory that has found the artist occasionally playing down the hi-octane, Eddie Van Halen-style guitar assault on which she first built her name. Beginning with the mid-album cover of Ennio Morricone’s “Il Girotondo Della Note,” these songs increasingly find mileage in shade and nuance, with more spacious and straightforward arrangements like the side two standout “Til It’s Over” living effortlessly alongside livewire meltdowns like “The Natural” and opener “Plain Speak.” On the latter, she offers a potential explanation for tapping the brakes on her trademark style: “I can’t keep on moving backwards.”
Pound for pound, Stern’s latest offering is as urgent and electrifying as anything she’s managed in the 16 years since her disarming debut. With more arrows in the celebrated musician’s quiver, her decades of experience seem to have imparted the crucial wisdom of knowing the right one to draw at any given moment. Every bit as unhinged and high-energy as that first brilliant flash across the blogosphere—even the relatively chill back-half gets bombed by angular, over-the-top rockers like “Working Memory”—The Comeback Kid is a portrait of an established artist with more to say, someone who still clearly relishes in the tentpole thrills that gave her music its sense of urgency in the first place.
It’s this last piece of the equation, the ever-pressing sense of everything everywhere all at once, that cuts deepest through this collection. And despite continuing on the journey of making new shapes with her time-tested sound, the clearest expression of the artist’s mission statement can be found emblazoned on the cover of the LP: In a playful sketchbook style, a honey-haired goddess hurls a flaming electric guitar through the starry expanse of the universe. With the album’s 2013 predecessor being the first to feature a photo of Stern on the cover, silhouetted in human scale against a desert mountain sunset with her longtime terrier pup named Fig, perhaps this is an invitation to consider the ax-wielding artist as something both larger than life, and closer to earth.
Watch Marnie Stern perform “Nothing is Easy” at Stage on Sixth in Austin in 2013 below.
Jezy J. Gray is an award-winning culture reporter and editor based in Boulder, Colorado, with bylines in ArtDesk, PopMatters, This Land, Colorado Public Radio and elsewhere. Find him online: @jezygray.
