Marnie Stern @ DC9
by DCist contributor Dave Weigel
You probably already knew this, and you might have been checking to see if this show, like Stern’s last D.C. show, featured a kissing booth. (It did not.) But: There is no middle ground on Marnie Stern. Her music either hypnotizes or it subjects the listener to an endurance test. This does not change from song to start: You make your choice at the start of her show. On Wednesday night Stern split the difference, and gave a packed house (in a small venue) a brief, 10-song set that set the fanboys groaning and spared the doubters any more pain.
The thing is that even if you’ve never heard Stern, you have heard her sound. Every one of her songs is carried by the extremely fast, extremely skilled, two-handed guitar tapping that Stern performs with her eyes locked in on her fretboard. Outside of Stern’s own records, it’s a sound you most often hear in hard rock and metal. But you hear it at very specific times, at the end of guitar solos, after artists have worked their way down the fret, wagging their tongues, and possibly standing back to back with their bassists as giant skeletons are lowered onto the stage.
This is the sound of every Marnie Stern song. It either grates or it captivates. Stern is a joyful live performer, and her music sounds better live, instead of the art-rock experiment that comes out of a home speaker. But there’s only so much high-end hammering a crowd can take.
Since no other band even attempts to sound like Stern, the people who came early got to hear wildly divergent opening acts. Exactly were a collection of gimmicks—shirtless, denim-clad, a trio consisting of a drummer and two men on keyboards. Their songs, when they clicked, sounded like rough early Suicide tracks, but their vocals were wild David Yow-style yelps, shouted through microphones that were phased beyond any comprehension. When the band broke to advertise their mailing list, audience members exchanged puzzled looks around the room. What did the guy say? Black & White Jacksons, a DCist Three Star Band who were profiled a year ago this month, put on a more conventional show with a more comfortable sound—early Dischord with extra wit.
Stern’s band walked onstage tentatively, testing out equipment that only stopped hiccupping after three songs. The first half of Stern’s opener, “Transformer,” suffered from too-quiet vocal miking. One song later, Stern’s drummer had to pause and fix the mic that had fallen off his drum kit. Stern and her bassist saw the opening for double entendres, and they took it. “It’s fallen off!” The drummer complained that the mic had been spring-loaded. “Let’s think of other things that can be spring-loaded.”
There is a bashfulness to Stern that plays off her sound, and she milks it. She paused midway through herself to tell a story about a pretty girl who let a “sexy surfer dude” use a bathroom after her, then blanched when he took a breath and wheezed “dude, that’s brutal!” She joked that she didn’t really remember the lyrics to “Ruler,” but as it happened, she really didn’t—Stern grinned and struggled through her song, apologizing afterward, because the band didn’t usually practice it.
The show’s high points made up for some of that, and for some of the malformed songs in the middle stretch. “The Crippled Jazzer,” the song that closed the set, got Stern away from the bottom of the fretboard and wrings everything out of a melody. This is a compelling artist with a fascinating sound, and at some point none of her work will be grating. But not quite yet.