Send "Marnie Stern " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchforkmedia |
 Marnie Stern can't sleep. Not well and not often, at least. That's what she says. I didn't learn of her insomnia for months after In Advance of the Broken Arm was released last February. But in retrospect, it made sense: When I first heard her music, I couldn't sleep either.In Advance opened with an eight-note guitar figure, cycled 32 times in half a minute-- about eight and a half notes a second. A brutal, highly repetitive pop song ensued. Marnie shrieked and trembled. Her rhythm section (Hella's Zach Hill) egged her on-- she juggled fire; he hosed her with gasoline to cool her off. She made hysteria sound hypnotic. What set her apart, though, wasn't showmanship, or even hooks-- it was her vulnerability. In a scene of bands that rely on technical prowess to sway fans-- or, if that doesn't work, beating the collective ass into ecstasy with noise-- Marnie Stern appealed to the heart. Her music didn't just aim to impress, but to move. For a couple of weeks, I thought of her as an emotive technician, but it became clear she was something else: A dizzy heir to Sleater-Kinney, or Helium-- arty, feminine guitar-rock that infiltrated Guyville without a mission statement....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Last year Carrie Brownstein (of Sleater-Kinney, may they rest in peace) wrote a playful review of the video game Rock Band. Instead of simply throwing down her hipper-than-thou card and snarking that social simulacrum, which she of all people is certainly entitled to do, she concluded by extending the game a cautious benefit of the doubt: "These days, it might be easier to exalt the fake than to try to make sense of the genuine. But maybe by pretending to be in a band, there will be those who'll find the nerve to go beyond the game, and to take the brave leaps required to create something real." I hope her optimism is actualized and the Rock Band franchise will trigger a post-Velvet Underground-like wave of new acts, but she didn't seem too convinced. With a similar measure of ambiguity, New York singer-songwriter Marnie Stern's sophomore release, This Is It & I Am It & You Are It & So Is That & He Is It & She Is It & It Is It & That Is That, in a more perfect Union, would generate a next-gen crop of music nerds who appreciate technical, not just technological, musical skill. Easily one of the most compelling records of 2008, This Is It is an intense 12-cut give-and-take between Stern's six-string, Zach Hill's frenetic drumming and John-Reed Thompson's bass. Hill's virtuoso performances are notable on their own merits, but also because, unlike on most rock n' roll records, they're not the source of the songs' rhythms. Instead, Hill's drums interacts with, fleshes out, shades and circles Stern's guitar work. She establishes the pace, manages how the tempo fluctuates, and marks the rhythm changes. The effect is a sophisticated, sometimes staggering, set of shape-shifting grooves....full text |
| Almusic |
| Marnie Stern's sophomore album on Kill Rock Stars is cursed with a 30-word title that begins This Is It.... She blames an Alan Watts essay but punters can blame her -- until they hear it, that is. While her debut, In Advance of the Broken Arm, was filled with her now wildly celebrated guitar pyrotechnics inside a sprawling yet inarguably hooky pop song setting, this set goes off in a different direction entirely. Stern is accompanied here by the same crew that worked on her debut: über drummer Zach Hill and bassist and engineer John Reed Thompson. Musically, this set feels like the more rocked-up twin album to Hill's brilliant and crazy Astrological Straits (also released in 2008 on Ipecac). Tempos veer and careen everywhere, from thrash to stop-and-start near-proggish excess to no wave constructions of indefinable origin. The rather interior emotional scope of In Advance of the Broken Arm is thrown to the wind as surreal, fractured lyrical constructs are set to match this ambitious mental hybrid brand of guitar rock. "Transformer," with its extreme metallic hammer-on repetitive riffing, carries an amelodic framework for her caterwauling voice with some stretched dynamics. Her guitar heroine-ism is still unchallenged here, and it matches the speedy powerhouse forcefulness of Hill's drumming. The back-and-forth twin-neck counterpoint in "Shea Stadium" ambles between proggish anthem and rock & roll arena finale. With the tempo changing nearly constantly, Stern's high-pitched voice, offering something unmistakably artful (à la Yoko Ono but multi-tracked), becomes a blur, whirling by with her piercing strings and Hill's jazzed-up (as in Billy Cobham's) kit work as the only things to hold on to. Believe it that this is not tape manipulated music, as it sounds very close to the thrilling musical acrobatics of Stern's live performances. All of this said, there isn't a pretentious note on This Is It...; Stern may be ambitious but her songs are grounded in humor, extrapolated hooks, and fragmented pop formulas. If the guitars didn't have such a metallic ring (check "Steely"), one would swear this was some mutant long-lost post-punk record that was channeling Christian Vander's Magma! The closest thing to rock "normalcy" on this slab occurs on the album's final two tracks, "Roads? Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads" and "The Devil Is in the Details." In these songs, big over-amped riffs (played on a vintage Gibson SG Custom) come roaring out of the box. She hangs almost conventional verses and choruses onto her piledriver axe work, and almost shouts in glee through the cacophony. Admittedly, This Is It... takes a bit of work to get through the first time, but it gets easier, resulting in a compulsive, even obsessive desire to it play again and again, ultimately leading to the assertion that "there is nothing else on the planet remotely like this!"...full text |
| Popmatters |
| The Spinto Band aren’t a difficult band to want to love. Since they formed in 1996, they’ve consistently delivered a contagious celebration that is playfully puckish and totally bereft of pretension. Moonwink, remarkably the band’s sixth album proper, is their latest 11-track collection of sugary, woozy, cutesy three-minute pop ditties. First single “Summer Grof” (in the band’s words “a vague tribute to the great comedienne Janeane Garofalo") captures this exuberance perfectly. Jaunty hand-claps give birth to saccharine keyboards and jangly guitars. Add an addictive chorus of “I won’t lie, I won’t lie, I won’t lie, I won’t lie, I won’t lie” and you’ve got a superb indie anthem. It’s a shame that it arrived in October and not July, because “Summer Grof” could truly have ruled the summer. Since their days as Free Beer, the Spinto Band have made music that is at once outlandish, kinetic, and luminous, and this latest record is no different. Often there are flashes of brilliance (notably “Summer Grof”, “The Carnival”, and album closer “The Black Flag"), but vocalist Nick Krill, keyboard player Sam Hughes, and guitarists Jon Easton and Joey Hobson are so keen on repeating themselves that much of their work, and a lot of this album, often frustrates....full text |
| Guardin |
| The Spinto Band make perky indie rock that sounds like a circus unravelling. In Moonwink's strange, happy world, barroom pianos bounce, sprightly scales twang from guitars, and drums rat-tat-tat with the energy of a Tango-fuelled toddler. Given that this is the Delaware band's seventh album, their exuberance is honourable. Several bursts later, however, and you're reaching for the pacifier. That's not to say that there's craft in the madness. Summer Grof sounds like a fabulous single, being blessed with a simple tune that burrows into the brain. The Black Flag could be a lost Wheezer classic, while the mournful fanfares at the start of They All Laughed, and lyrics about the fleeting nature of success, suggest some nicely melancholy undercurrents. The Spinto Band should prey on them; a little more shadow against sparkle could make their sun burn even brighter....full text |
| Pitchforkmedi |
| Big, splashy numbers don't always add up. Early reviews of the Spinto Band's latest album, Moonwink, have noted with some surprise that it's technically the eighth (or, depending whose count you believe, ninth) full-length from the youthful Delaware sextet. All prior releases, though, appeared on the band's own Spintonic-- at least until their aptly titled 2005 Bar/None debut, Nice and Nicely Done, later reissued overseas by Virgin UK. That makes Moonwink a classic sophomore slump, bursting with melody but overorchestrated and overthought. Neurotic, hook-packed songs like "Trust vs. Mistrust" and "Crack the Whip" made Nice and Nicely Done sound like the Spinto Band could become the Weezer of the new wave revival, splitting the difference between Pavement's Brighten the Corners and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The ringing guitars and Arcade Fire-sized arrangement of Nice and Nicely Done highlight "Oh Mandy" find a quirkier successor in solid Moonwink single "Summer Grof", a handclapping, punning ditty the band describes as "a vague tribute to the great comedienne Janeane Garofalo." We don't know who Spinto Band's Mandy was, either, but this song's willful obscurity is typical of an album that's often too clever by half. As if to compensate for weaker songs, Moonwink lets the Spinto Band indulge their instinct toward lavishness. "The Carnival" has the (dizzying) merry-go-round melodies its title implies, and it's one of the more restrained examples of the album's flightly falsetto harmonies, whoa-oh melismas, and careening strings and horns. Castanet-clicking opener "Later On" and synth-led "Vivian, Don't" have some whimsical charm, but by the time Spinto Band slow down for "They All Laughed", it's as if Humpty Dumpty fell off the Wall of Sound. Singer/guitarist Nick Krill's high, anxious voice starts to grate between the la-las and nice guitar rave-up of "The Cat's Pajamas", but it's his quieter colleague, singer/bassist Thomas Hughes, who sounds like he's auditioning to be the model of a modern major general on "Needlepoint", one of a few highly theatrical songs here relating to attire....full text |
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