Send "Screaming Females " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Screaming Females paid their dues in the basements and closet-size venues of New Brunswick, New Jersey, which despite its size and suburban dispersion boasts an active punk scene. Dodging bottles and cups thrown by their rowdy audiences, the trio developed considerable chops before signing with local label Don Giovanni: Jarrett Dougherty is a heavy drummer mercifully spare with fills, "King Mike" Abbate a bass player graciously liberal with melody, and Marissa Paternoster a guitar player with an enormous musical vocabulary that includes everything from classic rock to hardcore to New Wave to indie to lo-fi. Punk has traditionally prized attitude over abilities, but Screaming Females have both: Rather than muzzle their ferocity, the band's tight, tense dynamic amplifies the fuck-off stridency of their fourth LP, Castle Talk.There's only one female in the group, but Paternoster earns that plural band name. As a singer, she has a mighty howl that's as regal and haughty as that album title implies. She shreds and wails through these songs, grinds and slashes, often changing battle strategy abruptly. In fact, part of the thrill of listening to Castle Talk is trying to predict what she'll do next, how she'll bend the scouring lick on "Ghost Solo" into a song-destroying outro or how she'll turn the menacing riff of "A New Kid" inside out. As with her lyrics, Paternoster's guitar playing may sound stream-of-conscious, but there's an internal logic to her fretwork as well as a careful economy that favors sneering repetition of themes and compact solos. Due to gender and contemporaneousness, it's tempting to lump her in with Marnie Stern, but Paternoster has more in common with the Doug Martsch, J Mascis, Carrie Brownstein, and Neil Young (the Females covered "Cortez the Killer" on an early single)-- all artists who have subsumed themselves into tight band units yet manage to sound utterly distinctive. In that regard, the most interesting aspect of Castle Talk is the way Paternoster fulfills her frontwoman status by turning each song into a dialogue-- or, perhaps, an argument-- between voice and guitar. On "Boss", she adopts a shaky tone that gives each note a stressed wobble even as she declares, "I could be the boss of you any day." The effect is that of a woman steeling herself for a fight, psyching herself up to defy. On the other hand, her guitar swoops in suddenly to punctuate the chorus of "I Don't Mind It", adding emphatic certainty to her declaration that "it's just never enough." Her riffs alternately underline and undermine her vocals, but she thrives on the conflict between her dual instruments, as well as between herself and the band, the band and the world. That sense of scene survival energizes and innervates these songs: "I'm joyfully employed and normal!" she asserts on "Normal", as if we might miss that all three of them are enjoying every note....full text |
| Popmatters |
| It’s really a shame that a Screaming Females record can’t replicate the experience of seeing them live. Not for the usual reasons—live music is more immediate, powerful, what have you—but because frontwoman, singer, and guitarist Marissa Paternoster is barely five-feet tall, and watching her produce the unearthly howls and scorching riffs and solos that propel so much of Screaming Females’ material is a unique experience. Something about it seems a little off, and it provides a perfect visual complement to the band’s fractured, classic rock inspired take on punk. That being said, Castle Talk, their fourth and latest album, hardly suffers in an audio-only format. It pulls off the significant accomplishment of smoothing out a few of their eccentricities and presenting Screaming Females in a slightly glossier, more palatable setting, without compromising their personality or idiosyncrasies. Chief among these idiosyncrasies is Paternoster’s voice. Strident, powerful, and with the tendency to lapse into a shuddering vibrato, it evokes in equal measure Grace Slick and Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker. Castle Talk finds her dialing back on the bloodcurdling shrieks she occasionally deployed for emphasis, and, while this does deny the band some visceral impact, it also opens up the sound a little bit and presents a more tuneful, accessible aspect of the group. “Boss”, in particular, benefits from this approach; the verses are subdued, and the chorus (“I could be the boss of you any day / I tried really hard”) assumes a mournful quality, as if such effort isn’t worth it, rather than simply shouting put-downs....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Fugazi, Black Sabbath, Sleater-Kinney – these are all the bands I thought of as I listened to Screaming Females’ new album, Castle Talk. Because the band itself isn’t distinct, I reached for touchstones and hallmarks. That’s not a slur – how many bands can be truly singular? These references are used, in many cases out of sheer laziness, but also when faced with the utter mass of musicians producing work. In the absence of singularity, of epoch-defining work and the complete changing of paradigms, we’re left with a lot of musicians that do good, if not undifferentiated, work. In philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn called this Normal Science, the work of the scientist with her head down just moving ahead. What do we want to say? Normal Art? The work of the Nomal Artist is to play in the boundaries defined by the paradigm changing artists. They move ahead bit by bit, advancing the aesthetic genres, postmodernly mixing things, maybe performing a particular genre particularly well, maybe capturing the zeitgeist, maybe simply being yeomen artists doing the work that has to be done. Normal Artists can be fun or catchy or uninspired or drab. They can capture your interest or derision, but I think perhaps the defining characteristic is that they won’t really inflame the passions. I was thinking about this while listening to Castle Talk. Earlier last week, I heard Cymbals Eat Guitars. Not bad. They sound like Modest Mouse, maybe Built to Spill in parts. Screaming Females remind me of Hot Rock-era Sleater-Kinney a bit, Sabbathy-riffs, too. While Castle Talk can’t raise in me the kinds of feelings The Hot Rock or Master of Reality does, those bands are no longer (really) around. Modest Mouse and Built to Spill are not really making vital music, so it’s left to the Normal Musicians to pick up the pieces. Batman gets killed (or whatever psychedelic time crud Grant Morrison did with him) and Nightwing becomes Batman. Bucky becomes Captain America. The paradigm creators die and someone takes over for them. The hope, of course, is that Normal Artists sufficiently explore and develop the logic of the paradigm, heightening it until it reaches its logical conclusion – some kind of crisis point – where it transforms itself into the next genre, the next age or whatever. In the postmodern era, where every sad asshole complains about how it’s all been done before, this is all about combining and recombining ideas into new shapes until a truly novel idea does surprise us. Surprise, I suppose, is that thing we’re lusting after. Screaming Females do not get me because I’m not surprised by them. I enjoy Castle Talk, but it’s academic. It’s a false consciousness. Buying into the ferocity as a way of tricking myself into being moved by its power. I’m kind of old now, though, and as it goes with elderly crybabies like myself, maybe teenagers who don’t remember the elder guard will find consonance with the group. Hell, I liked Green Day until I started listening to the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks. But then, I had the good teenage elitist decency to bail on my former loves for being derivative. For being Normal Artists....full text |
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