Episode 21
Happy Friday! And if it’s not Friday where & when you are, here’s hoping it’s on its way soonish-like!
On this episode, we’re all about female-fronted bands! It’s been a year-and-a-half of this show and so it’s about frigging time, yes?
Creeping through an audio jungle… with only an audio machete and our wits to survive! #bogmonstermusic
While you’re here, do yourself a favor and check out the YT playlist!
Dan’s Notes
Not just boys fun – fave women-fronted bands
The Dishrags
One of Western Canada’s first punk bands, founded in 1976 as “Dee Dee And The Dishrags” in Victoria and in 1977 were the opening band on Vancouver’s first ever “punk rock concert” opening for The Furies while all of the members of the band were still enrolled in high school on the island. Over the next four years they would share stages with the top bands of the emerging Vancouver/Victoria scene and would make their recorded debut with two songs on the “Vancouver Complication” compilation LP in 1979, followed by a pair of EPs, Past Is Past in 1979 and Death In The Family in 1980. That year The Dishrags would cease to exist as a band but the members would continue to make music outside of punk into the 80’s. In the early 90’s some of their songs were featured on the excellent Zulu Records double CD compilation of Vancouver punk and alternative music from the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, and in 1996 Other People’s Music would release a complete discography of all of their singles, compilation tracks and live recordings titled Love/Hate. In 2005 they would also release the singles collection There’s No DeeDee and in 2022, show favorite archival label Supreme Echo Records released their posthumous “Three” LP. This year Jason from Supreme Echo is set to release their follow up “Four” album, making it a perfect time to check out this groundbreaking early Canadian band.
Damad
Prank Records was home to a lot of the greatest really heavy hardcore punk of the 1990’s and 00’s and Savannah GA’s DAMAD were one of their flagship bands. Their signature blend of crushing sludgy riffs and Victoria Scalisi’s intense vocals that alternated between a deep howl and demonic snarls over top of it all. I feel like the southern US produced a good portion of that whole Prank scene and Damad were one of the first bands from that whole wave to really break through to the national scene and beyond. I was a big reader of Virginia-based zine Slug And Lettuce at the time and they constantly featured intense photos from Damad’s shows around the region, and S&L editor Christine Boarts-Larsen wrote glowingly of Scalisi in the memorial article published in Vice Magazine after her passing from cancer in 2017. Their two full-lengths, 1996’s “Rise And Fall” and 2000’s “Burning Cold” are classics of DIY heavy music, with the iconic punk/metal graphic artist Pushead even lending his talents to the cover of the latter at a time when he wasn’t really doing a whole lot of art for newer bands at the time. The band would ultimately split up in 2001 after the guitarist and drummer departed to start the doom-metal power house Kylesa, but Damad have remained a favorite of mine that I had just not revisited in a bit until I listened to the Kings Of Punk Podcast’s “90’s Hardcore March Madness bracket” series of episodes and their name came up as a band that The Kids (™) had not really picked up on in recent years compared to some other bands of the era. I hope that more folks go back and check out their music as it totally holds up with the best of the genre but maybe isn’t remembered as well as some other bands from their scene.
Samuel SC
One of those “could have been” type bands that helped create a sound that went on to explode in popularity not long after they called it quits. Haliling from State College PA, Samuel were at that crossover point of angular post-hardcore and melodic indie sounds during their original run in the early-mid 90’s that germinated into modern “emo” tropes as we know them (with vocalist Vanessa Downing, who had previously fronted post-hardcore band Junction, being one of the few women fronting high profile bands in that scene at the time), even though they only managed to release a couple of 7”s and a split EP with Texas Is The Reason before the stresses of a bad tour followed by an unsuccessful attempted move by the band to Washington DC led to the end of their initial run. Even though they were short-lived the first time around, the band’s second EP “Empty And Then Some” on Art Monk Construction remained a longtime favorite of mine. Flash forward a couple of decades, during which some of their melodic emo peers like Hot Water Music and Jimmy Eat World rose to international acclaim, to the early 2020’s where the pandemic led to the band reconnecting for old times sake and deciding to give it another go, this time under the slightly altered moniker of Samuel SC. Not too long ago I was searching YouTube for a decent rip of that old 7” of theirs that I had loved and ended up stumbling across the band’s channel and catching up on the band’s newer run. After getting back together, they reworked songs from recordings for an unreleased album recorded back in the 1995 with indie rock superproducer Bob Weston that ended up coming out in 2023 as their debut(!) full length album “High Places”.
All of their recordings are definitely worth checking out for fans of the “Midwest emo”/melodic indie punk type sounds.
Spitboy
Bay Area punk legends whose career has gotten a little bit of a new focus over the past few years, Spitboy’s career spanned from 1990 to 1995 and resulted in one full length, a classic split LP, a few 7”s and later one of my favourite autobiographical chronicles of the era, drummer Michelle “Todd” Cruz-Gonzales’ excellent book The Spitboy Rule released in 2016 which chronicled the adventures of the band over their five year existence. As an all-woman punk band on the West Coast of the US at the time with a penchant for feminist-themed lyrics, they were frequently compared to and lumped in with the Riot Grrrrl scene that was exploding at the time, much to the band’s chagrin. The members of Spitboy were all quite vocal with their criticisms of that movement, and what they saw was a something that excluded women of colour and centered on privileged white women and their experiences, as well as what they saw as a somewhat infantilized aesthetic. Whether or not you share that view, you cannot deny the passion and force of their music. I was first introduced to the music of Spitboy via their classic split LP with Chicago’s Los Crudos on Ebullition and quickly made a point of picking up the rest of their releases when I had the chance. They were mainstays of underground spaces like NYC’s ABC No Rio and Berkeley’s 924 Gilman and others around the world during their five year span, after which vocalist Adrienne Droogas left to move to the east coast and join Pittsburgh’s Aus Rotten and the rest of the band continued as Project Hate. Flash forward a couple of decades and their drummer’s memoir and subsequent touring of punk literary and academic circles supporting it rekindled interest in the band in the modern DIY punk scene. In 2021, New Jersey’s Don Giovanni Records (home to Screaming Females, Jeff Rosenstock, and others) released “Body Of Work”, a comprehensive discography of all of Spitboy’s long out of print records from their original run, making it all that much easier for today’s audiences to check out their awesome music. Anyone interested in passionate politician punk should totally check them out.
Sleater-Kinney
Speaking of the riot grrrl scene and artists who cut their teeth there, Sleater Kinney are simply put one of the greatest bands out of the US Pacific Northwest of the past three decades or so (give or take a nine year break from 2006 to 2015 where the members pursued and excelled in other projects inside and outside music), and probably the biggest band to come out of that Olympia-based scene outside of maybe Bikini Kill. Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss (who would ultimately leave the band in the last couple of years due to creative differences) paired catchy twin guitar riffs, driving melodies and passionate lyrics over Wiess’ rockin drums over the course of eleven albums on labels like Donna Dresch’s Chainsaw Records, Kill Rock Stars and Sub Pop. I was fortunate enough to get to see them live in Portland Oregon during my time living there in the late 1990’s and by the height of their original run they even managed to win over folks like all of the grizzled old rocket line cooks from my last kitchen job in the mid 00’s after their stop here in Halifax opening for Pearl Jam . Oh yeah you may have seen that TV show about that one city that Carrie had with the drummer from Chicago noise-rockers Trenchmouth for a while there during the band’s late 00s/early 2010s hiatus as well. I know they are a fairly well known band at this point, but by some strange chance you have not yet heard the music of Sleater Kinney at this point I would suggest you change that and check them out for sure.
Newer Bands
Also a quick shoutout to some great woman-fronted indie and punk bands from my neck of the woods : Jale, plumtree, Bubaiskull, Rebecca West , The Chitz, The Stolen Minks, Rule Of Thumb, Vixens (RiP Rosie), Eekum Seekum, Thousand Knives, Suspex, Cell Deth (PEI)
Matt’s Notes
OK! I’m making danged sure that these notes are ready to go before we record the episode… or mostly so!
As is my habit, I’ll quibble and I’ll also throw out some caveats! As is my wont.
First off, we’re excluding powerful solo artists.
Liz Phair and PJ Harvey have each never been a part of any bands that jumped out in public! And they are I guess my among my top favorite recording artists ever, generally… same for Billie Holiday… Nina Simone… Sarah Vaughan… Etta James…
Or women co-fronting bands! Like Sonic Youth… Eric’s Trip… the Pixies…
And. And. And.
My lack of awareness of Riot Grrrl history or culture will be completely evident here.
On the plus, side… it’s a chance to revisit Royal Trux! And Cowboy Junkies! Among others… And so…
The Supremes / Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
I’m happy as always to start any of these shows with shout-out’s to 60’s or 70’s soul music!
I could have thrown in Ike and Tina. Or Gladys Knight and the Pips. Or The Marvelettes… or many from among the girl groups! The if list could be very long if I allowed it to.
So why the Supremes? Besides artistry, songcraft, transcendent vocals, in a group where any one could step out and be a star in their own right? Who brought us Diana Ross?
And besides the visual spectacle… and the huge historical significance of these empowered young black women practicing their art at the highest level… to a massive mainstream audience…
And all that’s for starters!
Sharon is less well-known, I think! I grabbed one of their LP’s from the stacks of Barnacle Records in Kamloops, BC on a whim… and the cover art, mainly… and they are known for curating at their store out there…
I’m going to be real… I know so little about Sharon… I do that with artists lots… intentionally not looking anything about them to preserve my entire image of them from their music…. and so… just for some basic info for this post… and it turns out SJ&TDK are “actually” of the mid-90’s until about seven or eight years ago… whereas I was thinking from all aspects of their sound and recordings they were maybe a lesser-known sixties or seventies entity… I’ll be danged and then danged some more! As a revival act (as per Wikipedia) they are pretty damned into the hard soul groove!
ANYWAY…
But those two records I own slap! They are, have been, and will be part of the ongoing vinyl rotation… in perpetuity! Which is almost the best thing I can say about any musician or artist or album! It will make you get down… but only if you have a pulse!
Portishead
All I can say, really, is that every second of every track on Dummy makes my hair stand on end… it gives me palpitations… I grab their LP’s, few though they are, whenever I can…
Look, I think I probably CHEERED in that scene from Fincher’s the Killer this past winter when Glory Box drops… on a soundtrack with nearly a dozen songs from the Smiths (and that’s EXACTLY THE SAME number of songs I’ve heard by the Smiths… weird, right??) even though (or maybe especially because) it lands in an incredibly tense scene early in the second act of the film… if we’re talking FIVE ACT STRUCTURE… English degree FTW…
There are times when I will throw this on the record player and eight, twelve, nineteen hours it’s still playing… Beth Gibbons’ voice just hanging there, filling up the apartment completely… and I am 100% sure I need to check out her bands and solo records outside Portishead…
It makes you… or maybe just me… want to dance like a spider… herky-jerky… you could thrown it into a hypothetical Beetlejuice movie… or a high brow art film, for that matter… spooky, warm, herky-jerky… groovy as fuck… all this turntabling and so forth… get out of town… clearly so good as to leave me sputtering for terms that are actually descriptive…
ANYWAY…
All their albums are great. Dummy takes me to another place entirely… whatever kind of music you call that…
Royal Trux
It bugs me sometimes how they never seem to get discussed in the “best alternative bands of the 90’s” conversations… or social media accounts all about 90’s music…
Look, they were big enough to show up at the end of High Fidelity, back in the day!
So what to say about them? I cherished this band in high school and early university. Cherished is the word. I cared about them enough that I drove from Halifax with friends to see them in Montreal in the fall of what would be the year I dropped out of university for the first time…
*They met us after and they were SOOO nice…
Jennifer Herrema is absolutely fierce. Her snarl would scare anybody in hardcore. She remains a vital musical entity in all kinds of ventures I’ve yet to check out. I’ve just discovered she has an Instagram.
I mean, Neil Hagerty does like a lot of the singing and most of the instruments… but for me, it’s Jennifer’s band. I could listen to her over just about anything. The fact that Neil is/was as weird and aggressive with the guitar is a bonus. Plus they always surrounded themselves with top-notch session players… I feel increasingly like this should be its own entire blog post…
They broke up. Got back together. Put out an album and a couple of excellent compilations… Neil got arrested… but if you go into just about anything from the nineties… they had a run of five basically perfect records, for my money… from Thank You until Pound for Pound… and the records before Thank You are, I’m sure, definitely worth checking out more than I did as a teenager… and, really, who puts out five perfect albums in succession… without a single skippable track? It’s pretty rare….
Cowboy Junkies
I don’t know why, but the Canadian-ness of this band is like… integral to my thinking of them as a band…
Thinking on why that is the case, I go back to late eighties and early nineties MuchMusic… wherein they must have been playing… but they were on the soundtracks of two films… Pump Up the Volume (1990) which I watched with my friends on VHS a bunch of times… and Natural Born Killers (1994) and you know… the same… in both cases they’re doing covers… of Robert Johnson, and The Velvet Underground, respectively… pretty danged cool, yes?
There’s like six or seven people in the band and like four of them are siblings including Margo, the singer? I think?
I’m actually trying to preserve as much of the mystique around this artist, as I do with many others… where I intentionally avoid looking stuff up about them… but for sure hearing those songs on those movies… pre-Internet, mind you… where cinemas and VHS took up a lot more of your media bandwidth…
But for real… The Trinity Session is a start to finish perfect album. Every single song lands. And so’s the same, I’m sure for their third record the Caution Horses… which I’m not as familiar with or passionate about… but that’s really just cause of not owning it ever on vinyl… I’m sure they have all kinds of legit things both in the past and present, as well as perhaps solo things between and/or among the however many siblings there are…
Margo Timmins’ voice can carry you wherever you want to go… and then some…
I’m grateful they have a rich discography nearly 40 years deep for discovering!
The Runaways / Joan Jett and the Black Hearts
I was late to the game on the Runaways! Like… I was in my early or maybe even mid-twenties… that’s how long it took for me to end up at somebody’s house where it would have been playing… because pre-streaming times you still had to pay for music downloads… the algorithm was still in its infancy… my impression being at the time: “surprisingly heavy” as in… “for a girl group”, I suppose! But the closest analogies I find myself reaching for real are the Ramones, the Stooges, and Motörhead… like… their contemporaries in the late seventies, mostly… they occupy this sweet spot in hard rock between punk and glam metal… which from me is extremely high praise!
I’ve bought copies of the Runaways vinyl and given it to a girlfriends’ daughter. And when I gifted the Mom in question a starter vinyl collection… for sure Change Up was in there… a double acoustic Joan LP! It’s fantastic… as a listening experience… but also spanning her career… of which I have let largely to discover besides the major early eighties hits… basically, my primary reference point for much of her catalogue is the acoustic versions… which is rad!
I mean, Joan’s teamed up with Paul Westerberg who… I mean… for him to go outside the Replacements or his own solo recordings, that’s a hell of a thing! And she covers Androgynous on the Change Up… and I think she’s played that song with Miley Cyrus… she starred in a movie with Michael J. Fox as a badass rocker…. and she’s shared stages with Dave Grohl among probably many many other top-level rock people…
And… Good Lord… just when I was even done writing this… super-early on a Thursday AM… I discovered a single on Apple Music as of less than two weeks ago… Joan Jett and the Blackhearts doing an up-tempo, punky take on the Lou Reed Transformer classic I’m so Free… so… thanks to everyone who made this moment possible, I suppose…
Because… at the end of the day… it’s Joan’s world… and we’re just living in it…
Folks, we are supremely grateful to you for checking this out!! Let’s do this again, soonish-like!
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ April 27, 2024 1:29 am
