Marnie Stern - "Marnie Stern"
With ten songs clocking in at around 33 minutes, Marnie Stern's third album masters the divine magic of the three-and-a-half minute rock song. But with a power quartet designed specifically to spotlight Marnie and drummer Zach Hill (Hella, Wavves), the songs are unlike anything else that's out there, at least unlike anything I've heard. Risks are taken, adrenaline rushes, tiny sonic symphonies are created. Then they end. Then a new one starts. It's exhilarating and it's exhausting. It's a workout. It’s a punk treadmill that never quite slows down for 33 minutes. It's a little like being in an animated cartoon and being caught up in a rolling snowball.
The first track, ‘For Ash’ clocks in a little long (a whopping 4:27), but it's a perfect opening track. It starts mid-guitar solo as if you've barged into the middle of a song and immediately, without buildup, you have Marnie Stern's mathematical finger-tapping style jumping into the merge lane and drag-racing along with Hill's precise manic drumming at a breathtaking pace. Then at about the one-minute mark, a steady chorus of overdubbed Marnies come in, singing in a high register, chanting in waltz time, sounding not unlike a church choir, then it breaks down into Marnie doing solo vocals, all the while allowing her voice to be overwhelmed by herself and Hill and Matthew Flegel's bass and Lars Stalfors's keyboards. The song does finally end abruptly but it never quite slows down. After a long pause between tracks - to allow the listener to catch their breath? - we jump right back into the mix again. Rolling drumrolls, screeching guitar chords. The song (‘Nothing Left’) is all over the place, going from a straight-out rock vocal with a properly annoying siren screech punctuating each line into a taunting children's chant to a pretty melodic vocal that's no less fast-paced and memorably subversive in its lyrics ("I'm using a color they call light blue. I'm checking a predator that's near you.")
This won't be the first review pointing out that the opening track is a song for a former lover of Stern's who took his life, as is the seventh track (‘Cinco de Mayo’) with it's opening line of "in the thick of the night, nobody there" and fractured images of Stern shouting out to the gods and decrying fairy-tale endings and swearing that her friend will always be here "and HERE and HERE.” I mention this only because while the Stern may be in pain and her songs are loud and sound large, they never sound mournful or angry. They just plow on looking for those intersections of sound where, to the listener, life just seems to stop and freeze and where comfort can only be found in a blanket of sonic noise. Since we the listener don't know the person being honored, we have to project our own universal needs into these tornadoes of sound. By understanding the power of sound, and how sound collaborates with sound, and by moving on when the sound has lost its purpose, Stern can almost be said to create prayer from guitar, bass and drums.
It almost doesn't matter what the songs are about. In ‘Building a Body’ we pretty much literally get a workout song in the purest form: a dressing for a mathematical study of sound, changing rhythm with every new repeated phrase like a mathematical experiment. In the brilliantly titled ‘Transparency is the New Mystery’, Stern attempts a broken-heart power ballad except it's the same four people and the OCD of shifts and long notes push forward the lovelorn angst of "I'm too late. You've got her." At just over three minutes ‘Female Guitar Players Are the New Black’ highlights Sterns finger-tapping as part of a power spin cycle that stops and starts and stops again before ending.
It's not exactly rebellion though. It sounds like the band -particularly Stern and Hill - are having fun. There's barking and whoops and harmonies and it just seems aimed towards making the listener feel good. But it is rebellion because it defies expectations. It isn't punk. Stern and her cohorts aren't a garage band. It sounds like math rock but there's so much emotion attached and too many detours. Influences definitely peek through (Deerhoof, right?), but the musicians just seem to be experimenting and hoping this all works while not necessarily believing it will. This is as freeing to the listener, I believe, as it is to the players.
Points are lost here and there. The finger-tapping is masterful and used well but sometimes it sounds a little too samey, to the point where sometimes when a song ends and another begins, it sounds the same. And sometimes you want more than a ten-second rest before the tempo starts up again. Also Stern may be fantastic at mixing sounds and usually hits the mark lyrically when you can make out the vocals, but this is where she has room for improvement.
But these are nitpicks. I'm hoping this record has already made the rounds; that it's blasting through headphones and being played on treadmills and long walks and inspiring. I hope there are kids playing it behind locked doors with the volumes turned up loud and thirty-year-olds blasting it through car speakers.
I'm expecting that ten years from now, Marnie Stern will be part of rock's future and by then she'll have added to her vocabulary and what she does may be slower and more calculated. She may do a full Blonde Redhead and change her sound. And as such, I think there will be a bunch of us declaring how much the early albums rocked. Which is why this may be the best time to join her party.
