Marnie Stern, In Advance of the Broken Arm cd

Marnie Stern, In Advance of the Broken Arm cd
Kill Rock Stars, 2007.






I should be enjoying this. Recommended to me by a formerly good friend of mine, long familiar with my affinity for noise riddled rock & the spazzier side of maximalist prog-punk (anyone wanna share a Melt Banana with me?), bedroom progger Marnie Stern's debut album on Kill Rock Stars was supposed to be a sure thing. Too bad for me, it wasn't. In Advance of the Broken Arm has many of the electric eclectic ingredients that should guaruntee a sweet spazz-rock record: eargasmic technical proficiency (this gal can really rip!), erratic switches in time signatures, playful lyrics, and continuous swathes of skull-rumbling double-stroke single-kick drumming courtesy of none other than Zach Hill, who also produced the album! So, you might be asking, with all this to enjoy, what went wrong? Unfortunately for my ears, everything. While Stern spent two years alone in her bedroom privately penning and practicing the demo skeletons of the songs that appear on this album, her overwrought songwriting indicates a serious lack of an internal editor. Stern's unique style of finger-picking is playful, peculiar, and intimately personal, but her songs suffer from seeming directionless and forced. Sure, her guitar playing is impossibly impeccable, but where's the impact, or the escastic oomph and bang of a bitchin' solo? More importantly, where's the soul!? If a soul can be found somewhere in this mess, it's most likely bound to be buried beneath layers of Zach Hill's unfocused, acid-washed production values. As a musician, Zach Hill is a frenetically paced, insanely gifted drummer who, with the exception of Brian Chippendale and Chris Corsano, has few peers in modern drumming. However, Hill's handicap is his own self-indulgent musicianship, and this carries over into his work as a producer on In the Advance of the Broken Arm. Had it not been for Stern's self-indulgent songwriting and Hill's lazy production job, Marnie Stern's debut could have been an enjoyable album full of complicated yet dizzyingly fun songs combined with lightning-fast guitar-gymnastics. Instead, In Advance of the Broken Arm is an instantly forgettable, meandering mess, made by an otherwise gifted guitarist and her pals.