“Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
and Then Watch That Basket!!!”
from the album In Advance of the Broken Arm
2007
iTunes
MP3 – “Put All Your Eggs…” [right-click/save-as]
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!”