Product Description
Ok. Let's get this out of the way. Marnie Stern can shred. She's a better guitar player than you, or me, or probably 99% of the people who have ever looked at a guitar. There. That's done.
Marnie came out of nowhere, or the Upper East Side of Manhattan to be exact. She didn't listen to ''good'' music (her words) until she was 23. The first thing she heard that made her head spin was Sleater-Kinney, followed a few years later by Hella, Boredoms, Melt Banana, etc. A Don Caballero video introduced her to the finger-tapping technique she now uses expertly. For the last several years she has played guitar for ''at least'' three hours a day because she feels guilty when she doesn't play. Marnie is one of the rare artists who was signed to KRS after sending in a demo tape.
Her debut record, In Advance of the Broken Arm, is culled from songs written by herself in her bedroom over a two-year period, with production and drum work by Hella's Zach Hill. Her songs are of the earth, birthed in an organic process where the finished product is much more striking than the individual parts: created in solitude, the songs contain a staggering number of layers, each one winding its way around the others, then counterpointed by Marnie's feminine, echoing, powerful vocals. Despite the artful pretensions of some of her influences, Marnie's lyrics are her secret weapon... every line has an understated elegance floating above the mindnumbingly complex guitar work.
What makes Marnie better than any of the other hundreds of nameless and faceless tech guitar wizards is her uncanny ability to somehow transform the most complicated guitar acrobatics into beautiful and concise 3 minute pop songs. Hers is an inspired, forward-moving art that you can take home to mom, and play for your kid sister. In Advance of the Broken Arm transcends any gimmicky ''recluse'' label because it is so present and immediate, and is certainly the most vibrant, original, empowering, and groundbreaking record released in a long time.
Review
Yes! It's hard to muster a more nuanced response to Marnie Stern, a previously obscure shredder and yawper who has just released the year's most exciting rock 'n' roll album. True, there are 10 months left, but you could spend at least half of them puzzling your way through ''In Advance of the Broken Arm,'' her riotous debut.
Ms. Stern builds her songs by pecking and slashing: she often taps out staccato patterns on the fret board, overdubbing fuzzy power chords to give these skeletal lines weight and force. She is joined by the jumpy drummer Zach Hill, from Hella, and by John-Reed Thompson, who adds some bass and other instruments. But this music feels, in the best sense, like bedroom music, homemade and meticulous. When Ms. Stern sings (the album s gnomic first words are, or seem to be, ''I am a vibrational match/In the water/We line up/Off a beach''), she sounds as if she s singing to herself.
Somehow these songs pick up momentum as they twitch: within those crosshatched guitar lines, the rhythm keeps shifting and tugging, and she peels off so many notes that you can t possibly hear them all. In ''Every Single Line Means Something,'' she slows down to a punk-rock strut, snarling and intoning the lyrics as those multiplied guitars divide and reunite and divide again.
This raucous, wriggly music will certainly make Ms. Stern a cult sensation, and no doubt she s not expecting anything more than that. But don't imagine that this album is some sort of endurance test: it s too joyful, and too pretty, to be considered difficult. One song, ''Grapefruit,'' starts off with scrabbling guitars but swiftly evolves into a scrambled variant of 1970s hard rock. (One pictures Ms. Stern windmilling on an arena stage, triumphant.) Another, ''Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!!,'' revolves around a singsong refrain and a grand, descending chord progression. In an alternate and better universe it s a hit. Or, to quote a different song from this extraordinary album: ''Yes! Yes! Yes! The answer s yes!'' --The New York Times
...Enter Marnie Stern. Signed to Kill Rock Stars after sending in a home demo, the singer-guitarist wowed 'em at CMJ in the fall, and on In Advance of the Broken Arm, her two-years-in-the-making debut written and recorded with Hella's Zach Hill serving as drummer/producer/co-conspirator, the out-of-leftfield bedroom player delivers on that early promise. Built from hypnotic hammer-ons, stutter-stepping time signatures and blazing tones, this is a pop record gone astray, a noise-y affair with a charming rough-and-tumble sunniness on every track that manages to impress technically while at the same time delivering dizzyingly cohesive songs.
On opener ''Vibrational Match,'' Stern sets her template, kicking things off with a bright, bubbling, finger-tapped riff that's barely set before it's joined and complemented by Hill's equally busy drumming. Seconds later, Stern's high, multi-tracked voice soars in, declaring ''I am a vibrational match!'' It's surprising, breathless stuff, a mix of talent and excitement that overwhelming at first. And before the listener can make sense of it all, the song shifts into a new, equally impressive riff, then quickly shifts back to where it began. These rapid changes and surefire tunes coalesce into a triumphant declaration: Marnie Stern is a force to be reckoned with, and she's happy about it.
This defiant talent lends In Advance of the Broken Arm a bursting-at-the-seams quality-every space on the record seems filled and ready to be discovered. On ''Absorb Those Numbers,'' horns punctuate a hammering riff as Stern sings, ''Hey!/ Now!/ Where does this begin, and hey!/ Now!/ Where does it end?'' ''Logical Volume'' begins as a noise freak-out but suddenly turns martial and anthemic. Stern recognizes that this constant flux needs a unifying element, and she ultimately uses her voice to hold it all together, many times employing it to double-guitar melodies. ''Grapefruit'' opens with her yelping ''Keep on!/ Keep at it!,'' seemingly exhorting herself, the music and the listener all at once, and ends with her high-pitched moan ascending into a strange digital crack-up, a moment as distorted and searing as any of the guitar work on the record...
On closer ''Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling,'' Stern repeats a simple narration about a room with a diamond ceiling, assigning noises to every occurrence and object until she creates a verbal-aural crossroads. It's a moment that resembles a children's audio book, and one that most clearly approaches a summation of her simple (not simplistic) belief in the profound power of music. ''We must dream on,'' she says finally. And on In Advance of the Broken Arm, Stern demonstrates the wherewithal to do so: to use her chops to support her heart, and not vice-versa. --Prefix Magazine
One of the most prevalent aesthetics over the last few years is something that, for lack of a better term, I'll call cartoon violence. It's probably familiar to most: excessively bright colors, caps lock, surreal disconnect of grammar and iconography, 8-bit nostalgia, OCD technicality and complication without finesse, supersaturation for supersaturation's sake; see it in art collectives like Paper Rad; hear it in indie/nü-prog virtuosi like Hella and Lightning Bolt. There are a couple problems with cartoon violence. The first is something I'll call The Ramsey Scenario. Ramsey was a very smart guy I knew in college who apparently considered his life's work to scream the word ''AWESOME.'' As a sonic shtick, a lot of these bands are finding that their endgame is exercise music for angry cats or soundtracks for people to pull their hair out to Romans amped on mescaline and screaming about how ripped their gladiators are. It s a route rife with possibilities but really easily mishandled. There are times that I've found myself practically in tears over ''Aqua Teen Hunger Force,'' but I m just as often shamed into measuring blissful overload with the same ruler I've had since I was eight. It gets old.
And Marnie Stern is a w**k, a ''shredder,'' just as c**k-measuring and Guitar Center-freaky as Hella, whose Zach Hill provides the percussive equivalent to her Van Halen finger-tapping. Her voice is shrill, her moves are sharp and chaotic; she makes excruciatingly high-energy rock music and wields it like a drunk with a laser. In Advance of the Broken Arm, though, has songs: dark, aggressive, romantic songs that retain our secret fetish for kiddie hysteria without making it a vapid pursuit. Part of what s scary about this album, and probably what makes it feel like an album and not an instructional video, is that these songs were written in a bedroom. She lived with them, and lived with them alone, outside of the context of live-performance ecstasy. If I'm in awe of anything about Marnie Stern, it's that these forty-four minutes took root in her head for two years before being shared. Invention is invention, but the pitch, the energy of In Advance of the Broken Arm seems like it would drive a body straight crackers. At the end of the album she confesses, ''The picture in my head is my reward.''
Her songs are weird, sure, and there's still some bad poetry and meaningless channel-changing that pollute stuff like ''This American Life.'' Most of it, though, feels as weighty and emotive as Sleater Kinney, or as seductive as Mary Timony in the mid-90s: fully-formed, feminine indie rock. Unlike bands she'll undoubtedly have to weather comparisons to, she's not a no-wave retread and her verses aren't Trojan horses for frippery. Sleater Kinney had ''I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone''; at the height of In Advance of the Broken Arm, two minutes into ''Logical Volume,'' Marnie and Zach do a frayed impression of ''Marquee Moon'' by Television a band that dealt and dwelt in the most un-AWESOME, leather-bound realms of the sublime while she wails the most contextually bizarre lyric on the album, sentiments too naked for her showy counterparts to dabble in: ''Thiiiiiissssssss izzzzzzz mahhhhhhhahhhh love for youuuuu.'' --Stylus Magazine
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