There’s a new Prometheus in town, with an axe as bold as any yet to thunder down off Rock Mt. Olympus. She descends in a firestorm of hammer-ons, riffs and patterns, kicking out distortion-laden, lasso-like tunes with untamed yet surgical precision. The guitar is back, ladies and gentlemen, and the message is written in smoke over the rubble in its wake: Marnie Stern can shred.

Yet to say so at this point has already become cliché. The performances on her first tour—incendiary even with an iPod in lieu of a backing band—pretty well seeded Stern’s rock-solid gospel of transcendent, frenetic DIY determination, as her debut album, in under a year, has sent trebly, well-earned tremors throughout all of Indiedom. After a brief respite, Marnie has geared up once again and heads back out on the road to notoriety, this time with full band cavalry in tow (“Bye Bye iPod!” her Myspace cheerfully decrees) to packed rock ballrooms coast to coast.

In Advance of the Broken Arm [Kill Rock Stars, CD, 2/07] is a nonstop, guitarified battery of pumped melodic action, delivering deft metallic shots to the waning arm of proggy post-punk with a pop kick and lyrics at once joyful and profound. That’s a mouthful, but a worthwhile one for sure. Stern’s auspicious emergence is exciting for far better reasons than the cheap thrill of talkin’ ‘bout shreddin’, let alone a lady that shreds. Her combo of confidence, energy and flagrant expertise marks the final blow to that aloof, too-cool-for-school beast born out of the ‘90s, the one that so often smacked of loath disinclination, angst and false modesty. With rare exception, the era was marked by a certain lackadaisical, pseudo-existential, anti-intellectualism that pervaded itself through deceptively graceless musicianship and lyrics either flatly esoteric or overtly personal. Once upon a time, it was uncool to “try” or to really show one’s chops, let alone manifest any creative objectivity or real ambition. Yet in the years since Y2K, despite the recent wave of reissues and reunions, energetic cultural progressives have been successfully ushering a sea change away from such disaffected posturing. This is the stage set perfectly for Stern’s propitious introduction, upon which she’s blasted out an elevated, masterful, contentious experience that rocks—shreds!—kicks down the door and wants it all. 

“I wasn’t really collaborating with people, I was just working by myself,” Stern told me after her set at the Knockout on her first pass through San Francisco. “I was listening to a ton [of music]. I was listening to Erase Errata, and the Talking Heads, and all different types of shit, and then I didn’t want to sound like anyone else, so I was trying really hard to come up with my own sound.” For the most part she succeeds, although she also makes no bones about her influences—an attribute which comes as a relief to her supporters among critics, given that her sound inevitably does betray a few. “The girls from Sleater Kinney I always liked,” Stern continued. “I like Eddie Van Halen. They were an influence, but they weren’t my major influence. Really, Hella was my major influence, and Spencer [Seim] from that band I thought was the craziest guitar player. I also really liked Lightning Bolt even though it’s a bass.”

As it happened, Hella provided more than just inspiration for In Advance of the Broken Arm. Essential to Stern’s jumpin’ juggernaut sound is coconspirator/Hella mega-drummer Zach Hill, who not only produced the album but supplied its crucially hyperactive rhythms. Unlikely though it may be for an obscure Brooklyn bedroom guitarist to connect with not only her favorite, but also by far the busiest drummer on the Pacific Coast, such is the magic of the record industry. “I had sent my demo into [Kill Rock Stars] and they said they would release it,” explained Marnie. “Sometimes they give the demos out to the bands on the label. Zach heard it and said he wanted to work with me.” Smart decisions all around, as the outstanding album that resulted has earned glowing and well-deserved write-ups, not only on Pitchfork, but in the New York Times,Washington Post and now Crawdaddy!.  

What’s fascinating is that Marnie zips straight from A to Z in terms of her listening habits and takes cues from unexpected angles, but with little evolutionary lexicon in between. No conversation about hammer-ons is complete without mention of their godfather, Eddie Van Halen, who Marnie acknowledges as an influence, although she was actually first drawn to the fret board-tapping technique by watching video footage of current instrumental prog/post-rockers Don Caballero. Similarly, her heavy-hitting song “Logical Volume” makes verbal reference to Springsteen, Television, and then present-day angular avant-ax-weilders, Orthrelm, in a single verse. When asked for her opinion of the cocksure guitar school that came and went between these points (Navarro, Slash, Bettencourt, et al) Stern replied, “It’s sorta lame in that way. I listened to the generation that listened to that older generation.”