Marnie Stern

littlethoughts

Anyone else a fan? She came up on my last.fm radio a couple of years ago and I've been a pretty big fan ever since. If you like bands like Hella or lightning bolt you'll be right at home (and probably already have heard of her). She has this reputation as the queen of tapping or something, and then gets criticised for not being as good as, say, Eddie Van Halen. But I think it's a bit unfair - most of the songs are not at all about virtuosity, but more just using quite simple tapping patterns to make weird and wonderful sounds rather than trying to nail as many perfect notes as possible. So for me at least she writes cool songs with good lyrics, quite unconventional structures and some really catchy riffs.

Here's a live vid. I caught her show in Bristol this year and they were fantastic, really good live energy (although she does suffer from that singer/guitarist problem of recording guitar parts and vocal parts that work really well in the studio, but are horrible to do at the same time live!)

and one of my favourite album tracks

Megii

Reminds me of certain early 90s US indie stuff - which is a good thing in my book! So cheers for making me aware, had not come across her before, and good stuff.