At last! A band that uses Girls in their name and has not just one female member but TWO!
More importantly they are also GREAT.
I give you Philadephia noisy jangle poppers Mercury Girls. I don't have a release date for it yet but apparently their debut single will be coming out through one of my favorite record labels, Slumberland. The band also features members of : Literature, Little Big League, and Pet Milk.
Did you know that the world's very first cassingle AKA cassette single was Bow Wow Wow's "C30, C60, C90, Go!" in 1980? This UK group also features Annabella Lwin who joined the band when she was just 14 years old.
It doesn't get much better than this '80s Athens, Georgia band fronted by Vanessa Briscoe Hay. Their music is like brittle sticks snapping under rhythmic punches. There are guitar melodies but even the vocals accent beats as if they too are a percussion instrument. There is nothing extracurricular about their songs, every note and beat is measured and executed with a dancing precision. Imagine a small and powerful motorboat skidding through choppy, rough waters. This is what their pioneering sound reminds me of.
Their unique version of post punk was inspired by (and peers to) bands like the B-52s, Gang of Four, Television, and Talking Heads but in a decades time would become an influence to the next generations of bands like: R.E.M., Sleater Kinney, Deerhunter, LCD Soundsystem, Wedding Present, Life Without Buildings, Fire Party, and Love of Diagrams to name just a small handful of the artists.
Do you like to cuddle? Do you like lo-fi, dreamy, bedroom pop? Do love female fronted C86 twee bands (think of the early days of Camera Obscura or The Concretes)? If you answer yes to any of these questions, I present to you a charming boy/girl duo called Eerie Summer.
I don't know how a band that features one member from Russia and the other from Finland came to be, but I am sure glad they did. Sometimes a little mystery is nice.
This Swedish Metal band Night Viper has it all. Bad ass ladies, classic Sabbath rocker hair, glorious moustaches, and a band photo that includes a black cat.
Imagine the belty power of Beth Ditto (The Gossip) fronting Judas Priest. Yes please!
What does sound mean to 34 year old Korean-American woman who can't hear them? Let her art show you.
“For me, sound had always been an idea—an intangible space that
separated me from others—so I was curious about how art could transcend
sound and vice versa.”
This interview (see below) has single handedly changed the way I think about music and sound. Like she discusses in this interview, my initial takeaway was that while I know sound can be projected in a wide spectrum of ways and volumes, this is still a limited understanding. There is a huge difference between sound and listening. I love her detailed exploration of this territory. Sound waves can also be felt and seen which is part of why seeing music (sounds) performed live is so stimulating to the senses. It isn't just something you are listening to, you are also feeling it, interacting with it, and seeing it move matter which takes the form of a band and their instruments. It is almost like putting a song under a microscope and seeing its core particles come to life by skittering about. The art Christine creates is much like this to me. Instead of her being in a band in a traditional sense, she uses a variety of objects (and sometimes people) to bring sound to life.
There is also a much needed dose of positivity here. We all fear failure and shy away from risk taking because of it. If you have aspirations to see an idea of yours come to life, there is only one way to do it and that is it actually DO IT. Nobody will do it for you. Nobody will execute the idea the way you would and if it doesn't work out, you always learn from that experience and keep growing as a person. Win / win.
This is another great interview and look / listen at her work. I found this particular quote about sound and people who can hear incredibly moving: "I saw sound as their possession. Now I'm reclaiming sound as my property."
And to further explore the rules of sound in society...
I am convinced that after watching all of the videos of her various work and interviews, I am a better listener now.
There are few more haunting American mysteries in Blues than that of Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. These African American women recorded just a small handful of music in 1930 and '31 (78 rpm format) and other than that, very little was ever known about them . . . until John Sullivan wrote this tremendous interactive New York Time's article last year.
The story is really a coin with two faces. It is one part staggering detective novel and one part fascinating biography and historical account. There are VERY few record collector's of this format of music and genre that would also have any sort of helpful leads in piecing together their collective story. Even more importantly there is a race against the clock to scavenger hunt for people who are family members or knew these women because we are fast approaching a century later. There is almost no one left alive to tell this story from first hand experience.
As it turns out, there are also very few detailed records kept for two poor, black women who may have also been lovers.
For a person like myself who wasn't terribly educated on either Blues or Gospel music, this quote from the article made me painfully aware that I had some homework to do.
"There was a place for lesbians in the blues world. Ma Rainey, Alberta
Hunter, Gladys Bentley, Ethel Waters, many others — you can’t tell the
story of the early blues without the lesbians. And according to the
music historian and gospel producer Anthony Heilbut, whose “The Fan Who
Knew Too Much” gets into these questions, there was a place for
lesbianism in the gospel world as well. I wrote to Heilbut and asked him
what he thought about L.V. He knew “Motherless Child Blues” well and
said he was confident that any black person listening to it in the late
1920s would have recognized her delivery as “butch.” But would the
church have made a place for her? Could you be both?"
This mystery has it all: A child prodigy, female musicians who paved the way for other women and held their own against the best male players of their generation, lesbian history, a scavenger hunt for clues, eerie music, murder, record collectors that border on hoarders, illegal liquor, religion, and an inconspicuous furniture company from Wisconsin.
Not to keep dwelling on music from the other side of the pond but my interest was peaked when a friend from Earache Records had told me they signed a tremendous new band but that it was not the kind of music we had grown to expect from them. Them being a record label that has released music by the likes of Carcass, Entombed, and Morbid Angel. He went on to say that I should have a listen and hear for myself why they had to sign them. I get it, I really do.
Kagoule is not a traditional metal band but they are still very heavy. They ka-chug-a-chug-a-chug with a bounce some of us old geezers might recognize from the '90s indie Mid-West scene with Albini at the helm. It takes a special band to blur genre boundaries of a well established heavy metal label roster and special they are.
Urth, the debut by this Nottingham, England trio reminds me of so many great non-traditional heavy bands that are also chunky and technical. Bands like Poster Children, Smashing Pumpkins, Hum, PJ Harvey (early years), and Failure are at the top that list. For those who enjoy weighty, highly volatile Pop songs, this is the band for you.
It has taken me decades to find a band that gives me that same kind of feeling in my chest that I had the first time I heard The Smiths. Desperate Journalist are a 4 piece band from London that features two women and two men and are named after a legendary Peel Session where The Cure sound off about a member of the press who gave them a less than positive review.
I have watched this video for 'Eulogy" ten times already today and I am excited to discover they are as good live as they are on record.
SQUEEEE! You can stream her whole new album Divers right now via NPR. I liken this to reading a choose your own adventure book that has no definitive plot (no two listener take aways will be the same!) and may require a dictionary to understand all the words she uses to spin her delicately orchestrated webs. It is as if Kate Bush and Björk (who apparently has been a singing coach of sorts to her) has created a chamber Pop opera and given birth to a star whose voice flits like a sprite through a maze of tall grass and mushroom caps houses. If you hate reading but love a good story, this is the gift you have been waiting for. Her vocabulary and use of language is a thing to behold. I am not sure I am smart enough to grasp and unravel all of the thematic layers found on this new record but I feel like a better person for at least trying. Prepare to be awed and English majors, there are a good 100 thesis papers to be found in her body of work.
Not recommended - playing Scrabble against her. I am 100% certain Newsom would win. Apparently Slate agrees.
There is site called Many Many Women that documents the women in the avant-garde / experimental music scene. It is the ultimate go-to resource of those interested in listening to, booking, or educating themselves to the ladies of this genre pool. Spoiler alert, there are a way more than you probably thought!
Here is a quote from the site about what they do: "The focus of this index is on women in contemporary/post-classic composition, free improvisation and avant jazz, electronic/electroacoustic music, sound art, sound installations, radio art, etc. A few of these artists may also work within relatively mainstream forms (rock, singer-songwriter, folk, dance music), but they are included here because of their other work that is more experimental. I’ve also included some classical composers who lived and worked in the early part of the 20th century; while their music may be more conventional by current standards, they deserve recognition as pioneers in their own right. "
One of my favorite bands the Blake Babies. They were a trio from Boston that made music from 1986 to 1993 with a brief reunion stint in the late '90s / early 2000s that I somehow totally missed.
A pseudo-interesting side note to the band is that Evan Dando of The Lemonheads fame was an early band member but the remaining three members : Juliana Hatfield, John Strohm, and Freda Love have more than enough talent to make up for his exit. Their songwriting style is complicated, highly melodic Pop. According to this new interview with the band, their long out of print catalog will be reissued next year (YAY!) and drummer Freda has a brand new memoir out called Red Velvet Underground.
If you are like me and didn't catch the Blake Babies live, you can download for free a radio performance from 1989 here in exchange for your email address.
As you might have guessed, the band members have been in various other projects that include : Antenna, Some Girls (not to be confused with the San Diego band with the same name), Velo-Deluxe, Strohm drummed in The Lemonheads for a stint and Julianna played with them as well for a bit too, The Juliana Hatfield Three (I bet you can guess whose band that was), and Minor Alps.
When a member of Rainer Maria recommends a band to check out, I gladly oblige. Petal as it turns out sounds very much like Rainer Maria and that is A-OK by me. Their new album entitled Shame comes out on Run for Cover Records on 10/23 but you can pre-order it now. You can also stream the whole record here, right now.
Once upon a time Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head) and Daisy Von Furth started a clothing line called X-Girl that was a ying of sorts to X-Large's yang (one of the original X-Large owners was Mike D of the Beastie Boys).
Their small store opened in the early '90s on Lafayette Street in New York City's SoHo neighborhood and across the street from X-Large. One of the highlights to the X-Girl brand was that artist Mike Mills created much if not all of X-Girl's iconic graphics and shirt designs. Limited posters of his gorgeous brand work were also available for purchase and I think of anything I regret not purchasing back in the day, it is these pieces of art.
The general look of the X-Girl clothing line was androgynous and simple. The idea was to produce timeless classics that featured clean lines and were form fitting compared to that time period's grungy counterpart. To be as accurate as possible, it was practically the Mac store of '90s fashion. The business was short lived as the shop closed at the end of the '90s and then the line was sold to Japanese company that still produced it to this day.
I would be lying if I said X-Girl clothes fit anyone above a size 10 but that is a different story all together. This believe it or not brings us to the subject of French Pop musiccalled yé-yé sung by girls and young women in the 1960s.
This genre of music was said to be inspired by The Beatles and their hooky line "She loves me YEAH YEAH YEAH". The fashion sense of these yé-yé girls (tasteful Euro-mod) were also said to be an influence on the X-Girl fashion line and often playing on the small TV inside the store was a video compilation of these original yé-yé music videos. I had several friends that worked there, including my then boyfriend. As they were closing up the shop some nights, I would sit on the bench waiting and watching these campy and totally intoxicating videos. This was my introduction to French Pop and I have collected it obsessively ever since.
It should be noted that this genre of music spread like wildfire all over the world so there a are ton of groovy girl records from the '60s to check out from many other countries too.
Here are the kind of videos that were on the X-Girl VHS collection:
I know we each come into our own in due time but damn, Tkay Maidza makes me think that at age 19, I could have been doing a lot more. Check out this remarkable Australian rapper / singer who still lives at home with her parents. Her videos are fantastic too.
2015 isn't quite over yet but if I had to name my top 5 record of the year thus far, it would include Trash Kit's Confidence. They are an all female three piece band from London playing polyrhythmic punk. There is African fingerpicking styles blended with raw energy and soul but there is so much more rumbling out of this band too.
It would be in poor taste to name my blog Attagirl! and not pay tribute to a spectacular song that carries the same name by the UK band Heavenly.
This Oxford, England band that lived from the late '80s to the mid '90s has a large family tree of bands before and after them that are worthy of mentioning and exploring to.
Talulah Gosh came first in the mid '80s.
After Heavenly disbanded there was Marine Research.
And that brings us to Tender Trap.
Ex member Peter Momtchiloff has been in a number of bands including Scarlett's Well (also includes Bid of The Monochrome Set) and the Would Be Goods.
Most recently there is The Catenary Wires that features Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey.
Happy exploring! There are several days worth of listening built into this family tree of bands.
Nancy Sinatra was among the first women I began obsessively collecting records by. I have always been drawn to the complex layers at work behind her image during the '60s and '70s. She was a strong woman yet was also daddy's good little girl (Frank Sinatra to be exact). She was a sex kitten with claws. She believed that a feminist could still be sexy and that the two were not mutually exclusive from each other. Here is a great read on "Female Empowerment, Nancy's Way" . This push and pull of sexy and strong appears time and time again in music (from Kathleen Hanna to Beyoncé) so while there were plenty of bad ass ladies that came before Nancy in music, it really all started with her for me.
I dig Nancy so much that I took my DJ and social media name from this hit Lee Hazlewood wrote for her.
Attagirl! is slang for an exclamation of praise to a girl or woman. I can't think of a more positive name for what I would like to accomplish here. I want to celebrate women in music while hoping this site will motivate other women to start and / or keep making music too. If she can do it, you can too. If I can do it, I PROMISE, you can too.
