I’ve always been a bit weirded out by people who have really eclectic taste in music. There’s a part of me — the part that thinks people need to like things for a reason, dammit — that gets irrationally frustrated when someone seems to consume everything and enjoy all of it indiscriminately. Maybe it’s jealousy, because having eclectic taste always seemed kind of cool to me, and liking more music and being less picky would probably be awesome. But despite occasionally making efforts to branch out and become more of a critic who listens to everything, I tend to go back to the same types of music that I know I love.
The most obvious example of music that fits into my comfort zone is loud female-fronted guitar rock. At this point, I would say I’m somewhat infamous for loving this style of music among anyone who has had any sort of musical-related conversation with me at any point. As a result, for awhile after making the blog, I was trying to write about other music to sort of diffuse that stereotype a bit and to show people how many different cool things I listen to. Doing this, I figured, would solidify my coolness in the minds of the people. That didn’t really happen. And now I don’t really care, so with this post, I’m just gladly embracing my stereotype.
Because 2012 — which I think has otherwise been a forgettable year lacking any top-end albums so far — has had a lot of loud female-fronted guitar rock albums that are among my favorites so far. What’s more, there’s actually been a lot of diversity among this narrowed down field of music. There seems to be more of these groups embracing some disparate influences beyond the obvious Sleater-Kinney, PJ Harvey, and Breeders comparisons that are always foisted upon such bands. Here are some of the new ones I have been enjoying:
Disappointingly, only one female actually screams in this New Jersey power trio fronted by guitarist/singer Marissa Paternoster. Her vocals are plenty to fill a room though, and she’s also probably the best guitarist in rock today. Ugly is the hard-working band’s fifth album and their best yet, a 14-song, 54-minute barrage of guitar heroics and punk sneer with a dirty sound that lives up to its title. Paternoster’s noisy but melodic fretwork garners well-earned comparisons to previous indie rock guitar wizards like Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis, but she also ventures into other styles like on “Doom 84” which almost sounds like an early metal track. If there’s a criticism of Ugly, it’s that there’s almost too much rockage to handle in one sitting, but I think I can live with that.
This L.A. band, fronted by singer Emily Armstrong and guitarist Siouxsie Medley, just released their debut album in April. They have a sound that’s been really missing in the last few years, playing bluesy hard rock with mainstream appeal that seems made for the radio. In fact, their lead single “Weatherman” managed to make some noise (in more ways than one) on the otherwise embarrassing Billboard Modern Rock charts, which has been strictly a boys club for over a decade now. Armstrong is a throwback style of rock frontwoman, with seemingly unlimited vocal power and charisma, and Medley is a skilled guitarist who unleashes tons of heavy riffs. What I oddly love about their debut album is that it doesn’t sound “indie” — it’s just an unpretentious slab of crowd-pleasing rock that deserves a wider audience, especially in the world of mainstream rock that desperately needs something new.
Royal Thunder play a style I’ve been increasingly obsessed with, pairing alternative rock style female vocals with more noisy stoner-rock or metal music. Overall the band plays a mix of classic rock, stoner rock, and metal, with frontwoman Mlny Parsonz bringing it together with her wailing, sultry vocals. Sometimes really heavy music can seem soulless and impersonal, but Parsonz adds a real emotional core to Royal Thunder’s music that separates them from a lot of similar groups. CVI is a massive rock album, clocking in at over an hour in length and featuring a good mix of shorter almost radio-ready tracks like “Whispering World” and “No Good” and longer doom metal dirges like “Shake and Shift” and “Blue.”
Is Is is (yep) a local band that I stumbled upon when one of the members’ other bands played at my school a couple months ago. Right now I don’t know too much about them, except that I bought their full length III on iTunes and have been enjoying it quite a bit. The band is all women and plays a style they’ve dubbed “witchgaze” — they sound like a hybrid of stoner rock, punk, and shoegaze groups, with some occasionally poppier numbers thrown in. My favorite moments of the album are when the band really lets loose, like on the epic penultimate track “Sun Tsunami” that reaches a space-rock style climax and builds for nearly eight minutes. The group has an original sound going for them and I hope they can continue to gain traction on the Twin Cities scene that I frankly find kind of boring.
Marriages are another band fusing a few different sounds together. They mostly fit into the shoegaze style, with Emma Ruth Rundle’s voice buried under a lot of sound. But the typical shoegaze guitars are replaced with some metal riffs that make the band sound a lot heavier (imagine a whole album of songs that are a bit like “Loomer” by My Bloody Valentine). Kitsune is their first release and is only six tracks and 30 minutes long, but it’s incredibly cohesive, with the tracks blending into each other and making it sound like one solidified piece of music. Within that cohesive structure, there’s a lot of different dynamics and moods that make the whole thing kind of seem like an adventure.
The Noise Made By People 