A review of Marnie Stern's third album, Marnie Stern, as published on Vibrational Match in August 2010:
The alarm bells started to ring when you heard your favourite frantic guitarist talking about how her new record will showcase an increased focus on songwriting. They only got louder when it became obvious that this would also be a more directly emotional album than the two that preceded it.
Since you already live in a world full of singer-songwriters, their mouths full of trite metaphors, always happy to take up the first tired chord progression that comes to hand, you had no desire to the artist who was at the heart of the careful frenzy of In Advance of the Broken Arm and This Is It reduce herself to that level. Turns out needn't have worried. Marnie Stern (the album) is not a reduction but a condensation of Stern's previous accomplishments. The reduced tracklisting should provide a hint as to what's really going on here: everything that was present on Stern's first two albums is here in its purest, most compressed form. What this means is that roughly half the tracks here feature Stern's most direct and muscular compositions yet (from the ringing clarity of `Transparency is the New Mystery' and `Risky Biz' to the monstrous, Steve Albini-esque guitar and bass parts of `Her Confidence', which are fierce enough to send even Zach Hill's drums skittering in their wake), while the other half are overloaded to the point where they hit My Bloody Valentine-esque depths of synesthetic delirium.
Opening track `For Ash' drowns a lament for a deceased ex in waves of crashing percussion, hammer-on guitar, and wailing vocal chants. When the Stern manages to make the same sentiment scream through the noise of the latter `Cinco de Mayo', it becomes obvious that the aforementioned emotional content *is* here, and equally obvious that it has always been a part of Stern's approach song-writing. Stern's songs have always teetered on the brink of chaos, but the stakes are higher here, the longing for something resembling a genuine connection more desperately felt.
This description might make Marnie Stern sound like a drearily self-important record, but Stern's commitment to playful lyrical conceits and joyous noise stop that from being a problem - `Female Guitar Players Are the New Black' and `Gimme' see Stern sounding freer and more alive and confident in the chaos than ever before, while `Building a Body' manages to both reference Field of Dreams and provide a conceptual sequel to `Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling' over yet another riff that should shame most of Stern's contemporaries into early retirement.
Closing track `The Things You Notice' sees Stern going solo, letting the warm fuzz of a few slowly strummed chords overwhelm the twinned guitar and vocal melodies. The sublimation of song into noise is a happy one here, an illusion of blissed out contentment that is perfectly fitting for a song about new love, and every bit as fleeting, every bit as easily dispelled when the album stops and you find yourself pressing play, starting the whole cycle over again.