Photo by Lee Klawans

CD: In Advance of the Broken Arm

This is the most oddly compelling record I’ve heard in a long time, and I hereby declare it genius. A grossly overused word, but completely justified in this case. This album, and most likely this artist, will be misunderstood in the same ways Philip Glass and Frank Zappa are misunderstood. There’s more innovation in these 45 minutes than most of us will be able to conjure up in a lifetime. Strong, I know. But I friggin’ LOVE this.

So, what does it sound like? Well, picture all of your sister’s old dolls, the ones you mutilated and buried in the back yard, rising from the dirt beneath a full moon…they spend some time organizing and scheming, and then all show up in your bedroom wielding tiny knives. These are the songs they’d be singing.

Where to begin… Marnie Stern is a girl who clearly spent quality time with her Don Caballero, King Crimson, and early Residents records. Her songs are dense layers of sound with polyrhythms, trance-inducing melodic lines, and dissonance a-plenty. The less adventurous might casually listen to this and say, “Wow, that sounds like a bunch of people noodling and making a lot of noise.” To be fair, there are plenty of bands out there who pretend to be really “deep” and wail away making a lot of loud, happy accidents with an “I meant to do that” air about them.

Spend two minutes paying close attention to this recording, and you will be absolutely awestruck at the detail: every tiny sound, every lightning-fast piece of drumming, every melody, and every bleep and squeal is manipulated with the skill of a surgeon. There is nothing “chance” about this.

So who is Marnie Stern? I don’t know where she’s been hiding out, but she’s an extremely talented 32 year old guitarist from New York that employs her own variation on the finger-tapping style of playing the instrument. Like Kaki King, this is someone with the looks and ability to have some serious pop hits if she chose to roll with the mainstream. Thankfully, she left the mainstream in the dust and bombed the bridges on the way out of town.

Yeah, but is she one of those guitarists who is able to use pedals and effects to make herself sound better than she really is? I mean, is she really a monster player? One can be forgiven for asking the question, but the answer lies in tracks like “Precious Metal”. Marnie Stern tunes will be showing up in future levels of Guitar Hero that only those savant gamers in Japan will even be able to attempt.

What about the vocals? They frequently show up in deceptively sweet choruses of voices, and can sometimes be hard to decipher amongst the mix — establishing strong associations with the more opaque moments of Deerhoof and Cibo Matto. That’s a bit of a generalization, though — on tracks like “Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling” they ring true clean and clear, and on tracks like “Absorb Those Numbers” and “This American Life” they actually venture into somewhat poppy territory, albeit mainly akin to a darker version of The Go! Team. Her vocal melodies are as highly original as the rest of her compositions.

This is not a prog album. This is not a noise album. This is definitely not a rock album or any of the other inadequate terms that might be applied to the offshoots of rock. To be frank, I don’t know what the hell this is, and that’s what is so exciting about it. The most intriguing and captivating thing I’ve heard so far in 2008, hands down.

- Russ Starke