Marnie Stern Returns in a Blaze of Guitar-Shredding Glory on The Comeback Kid
Stern's latest offering is as urgent and electrifying as anything she’s managed in the 16 years since her disarming debut.
It’s been an uneven century for the electric guitar. But as synths and samplers gripped the late aughts by the scruff of the neck, Marnie Stern’s exuberant 2007 debut LP In Advance of the Broken Arm made a compelling case for the embattled ax with a freaky and frenetic sense of style. A punched-over hornet’s nest of finger-tapped polyrhythms, breakneck drums and bratty garage-punk vocals, it announced a shred-heavy indie rock renaissance and kicked off a string of critically lauded albums for the New York songwriter that carried on through 2013’s comparatively subdued and groove-forward The Chronicles of Marnia.
10 years later, a month after being dubbed one of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone, Stern is back with her first collection of new music in a decade. The cheekily titled The Comeback Kid finds the 45-year-old picking up right where she left off, serving us a heady mix of restless riffs and nervy rhythms that reveal the steady strokes of a seasoned songwriter. After years of painting by the numbers as a regular member of the 8G Band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers, the effervescent new record is a return to form for an artist ready to dive back into a more boundary-pushing sonic approach: “The sound is hard to hear, right? / You can’t take it,” she wails on the blistering single “Believing Is Seeing,” upping the ante with her trademark maximalism. “What if I add this! And this! And this!”
But it’s not all big additions on The Comeback Kid. While its singular collision of math-rock and post-punk is most cogently expressed at the top of the volume dial, Stern’s long-anticipated follow-up continues a trajectory that has found the artist occasionally playing down the hi-octane, Eddie Van Halen-style guitar assault on which she first built her name. Beginning with the mid-album cover of Ennio Morricone’s “Il Girotondo Della Note,” these songs increasingly find mileage in shade and nuance, with more spacious and straightforward arrangements like the side two standout “Til It’s Over” living effortlessly alongside livewire meltdowns like “The Natural” and opener “Plain Speak.” On the latter, she offers a potential explanation for tapping the brakes on her trademark style: “I can’t keep on moving backwards.”