Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm

Best of 2007: Part Six

Finals really put me in the mood for a few things, one of them being frantic shredding. From the very first notes of this album, it is wildly apparent that Marnie Stern's guitar work qualifies as "shredding." 90% of her fretwork consists of fingertapping and the other 10% is just plain ridiculous, discordant notes. Zach Hill from Hella played the drums on the album, which means that basically every aspect of the album was technically off the wall. The recordings are a schizophrenic nightmare of panning; notes come from all angles as if your two lousy computer speakers somehow had surround capabilities. This is all fine, even exceptional, but what sets this release apart from the gret number of technical, noisy, releases this year? The songwriting is particularly good. It's so easy to lose direction when abandoning traditional song structures for more technical song parts, weaved together loosely, however the album has a good balance of songs both from the traditional school of songwriting, with hooks and all, and also from the post-punk school of "Fuck everything including you and your fascist structured music."

In Advance of the Broken Arm