I'd Love to Turn You On #230 - Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm

            New York guitar virtuoso Marnie Stern is something of an enigma. She plays jagged, erratic noisy pop that is hard to characterize as anything other than “math rock.” But it’s different than many artists that have had the math rock designation assigned to them. Like its older and equally as polarizing cousin, “prog,” it’s almost as though much of it is defying you to like it. For one thing, it never stops moving. Like a shark feeding frenzy, it’s all over you immediately out of the gate and doesn’t let up. It revels in its own excess, actually defying you NOT to like it. Like when Jon Spencer name-drops his own band in 75% of the songs on a Blues Explosion record, it insists upon itself in the most endearing way possible. It’s bragging without saying a word. It’s hard to imagine anyone not getting immediately excited within seconds of their first listen to Stern’s 2007 debut record, In Advance of the Broken Arm.

            Stern came seemingly out of nowhere with this debut, having suddenly inked a deal with Kill Rock Stars after they heard a demo of songs that she wrote in her bedroom over the previous two years. The album showcases Ms. Stern’s angular finger-tapping style, over her own reverb-laden vocals and washes of discordant synth, then adds in some of the most hyperactive drums ever recorded, courtesy of fellow noise rock mainstay, Hella’s Zach Hill, who also produced the album. What sets this record and Stern’s subsequent output apart is her ability to take this chaotic sound and create killer pop hooks that are as heavy as they are catchy.

            I cannot reiterate enough just how Stern’s proficiency on the guitar really makes this record come alive. She genuinely shreds, for lack of a better term. Think Robert Fripp-level mastery combined with the complex time signatures of Don Caballero or Oxes and you might get a slight idea of what’s in store for you here. “Plato’s Fucked Up Cave,” for example, offers a bouncing, progressive rock guitar pattern with a Hill drumbeat that sort of staggers ahead drunkenly. In the opener “Vibrational Match,” Stern demonstrates a repeated finger-tapped riff with definite nods to the NYC no wave movement. “Every Single Line Means Something” is a stomping rocker akin to Sleater-Kinney (one of her biggest influences) and “Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket,” is a simple pop offering with vocal refrains that sound almost ‘60s girl group-anthemic.

            There was a time there in my late teens and early 20’s when I was a kind of a math rock fanatic. I listened to bands like Don Caballero, Melt-Banana, Dysrhythmia and the Boredoms fairly religiously, but by 2007 I had sort of moved away from like that. When this record came out, it brought me right back in. Marnie Stern has released some of the most interesting and intricate guitar-based music of the 2000s and even though In Advance of the Broken Arm is by no means her strongest effort, it is a very strong debut. And it’s an indication as to what would become of her songwriting as she matured from record to record. She really isn’t discussed near as much as she deserves, which is a shame because this girl can shred like very few others can shred. But her music is about much more than just showing off her wankery. It’s about rock n’ roll excess and at the same time about undeniable pop sensibility. It’s about the song first and foremost. The wankery is just gravy.

           

            - Jonathan Eagle

An interview with Marnie Stern

I called Marnie Stern last week just as she was walking into a coffee shop in New York City. She told me, “I would like for people to think of me as a songwriter instead of just a guitar player because it becomes like a carnival act.”

It’s easy to understand how she might seen as a novelty: a chick wields a double-neck axe and rips out fast and nasty licks. For her new album, though, she focused more on the songwriting as opposed to “hiding behind tricks” like she had on previous releases.

“My tendency is to put a lot of stuff in there,” she told me, explaining her earlier releases densely layered sounds. “These songs have a simpler structure. This album is more straightforward and direct.”

It’s also more personal. “For Ash,” a song that she made available on the Internet before the self-titled album’s release is about an ex-boyfriend who killed himself last year. She’s reluctant to talk about the stories behind these songs. All I could get out of her was “I put a lot of myself into them” and “it was cathartic to write them” and “it’s just personal stuff.” She recently told the Village Voice: “I let it all in, I mean, on the thing, as opposed to being abstract. And I know it's OK, but I feel embarrassed, a little.”

Even the album’s cover, which was painted by her good friend, Brooklyn artist Bella Foster, is steeped in personal narrative.

“It’s a painting of my bedroom,” Stern told me. “Not actually my bedroom. It’s idealized. Lots of little things we’ve talked about together. My dog. Guitars. Stuff like that.”

She told the Voice writer that “she worries that all the recording, writing, interviewing, and touring is just vanity.” I got a sense of that when I talked with her last week. It seemed as though she was reluctant to say anything because she couldn’t quite understand what the point would be if she did.

I might have caught her near bedtime. It was about one in the afternoon; All the articles I read about her said she stays up all night and crashes somewhere around the noon hour.

Plus she was with her band. “They’re sick of hearing me talk about this stuff,” she said.

Which might be a passive-aggressive way of saying the album speaks for itself.