So I popped into the Middle East Upstairs for an evening of all-female rock ‘n’ roll. Yes, let’s just get it out there and be done with it: all four bands that took the stage that night—Tomboy, Slutever, Hilly Eye, and Potty Mouth—consisted entirely of women. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo-on-a-stick. Now that’s all I’m going to say about that, because the sex of that Monday night’s performers was not the point of the show. After all, we have been to plenty of shows in which the performers were male, have we not? And did we feel the need to make a big to-do about the lack of ovaries in those instances? Well, maybe some of us did, and that’s cool; for right now, let’s just let rock ‘n’ roll be rock ‘n’ roll regardless of what type of situation happens to dwell in the pelvic regions of the people playing it, hmm?
Okay, good talk.
Kicking things off were Boston/Hampshire-College-based three-piece Tomboy, who began their set with their flagship song “PML (Pretty Much a Loser),” a righteous fuck-you directed at some anonymous boy who seemed “way cool” at first, what with his “cheekbones” and his “feminist overtones,” but then turned out to be pretty much…well, you get the idea. “PML” was a kitchen-sink-smorgasbord of cheeky, toggling from a blistering-punk verse, to a surprisingly prettily harmonized Vivian Girls-ish chorus, to a “My Boyfriend’s Back”-style chant breakdown, all within the space of three minutes. It was a blast, and set a high watermark that Tomboy just kept right on hitting.
The youngest and greenest of the four bands, Tomboy were also, in true punk style, the heart and soul of the evening. They were clearly utterly psyched just to be onstage making people dance, and despite their inexperience, or perhaps because of it, they positively radiated swagger. Madeline, Tomboy’s vocalist-cum-drummer and swaggerer-in-chief, held the stage like she owned it even from behind the drums, where she sat for most of Tomboy’s set before strolling up to sing the last few numbers at the front, while unashamedly doing a Charleston-like jig-type-thing that I found entertaining as all get-up. Aside from the glorious “PML,” standout numbers included: “PYOT,” which stands for “put yourself out there,” which is, as Madeline breathlessly explained, what you ought to do when you see someone across the room that you might, in so many words, want to make out with later on; and “I’m in the Fucking Band,” which is about how fucking annoying it is to have guys at shows ask you if you’re like, someone’s girlfriend or something when you are, in fact, in the…you get the idea.
Next up were Philly two-piece outfit Slutever, whose self-described “shit-fi” sound was the snarliest and scuzziest of the evening. The first thing waifish, peroxide-blonde mop-top of a drummer Nicole Snyder said upon sitting down at her drum kit was that Slutever were tired of playing their own songs and therefore would probably play a lot of covers, which struck me as a rather punk-as-fuck thing to say. From there on in things just got punker, with guitarist Rachel Gagliardi waggling her face furiously back and forth at the mic like a jaguar shaking its prey to death, while hacking away at her guitar, which was soaked in milkshake-thick chorus and several kinds of distortion and sounded just epic. Every band had its unique charms, but judging purely on the level of the sonic pleasure flooding through this old scuzz-junkie’s frazzled hypothalamus, I enjoyed Slutever’s set the most.
When Hilly Eye got onstage, my first thought was, “Holy shit, there are only two of them!” I’d been listening to their debut—Reasons to Live, which came out this past January on Don Giovanni—for the better part of a week, and the entire time I assumed they were at least a four-piece. But nope, there are only two of them: Amy Klein singing and strumming coolly-as-a-cucumber on guitar and Catherine Tung hammering away on drums so marchingly that at times I felt like I should salute instead of clap. They owe their big sound in part to Klein’s quietly virtuosic use of the loop machine at her feet, on which she recorded and then played over herself sometimes up to five or six times over.
Of the show’s four acts, Hilly Eye were clearly the ones that were not like the others. They trafficked in almost none of the cheeky riot-grrl-type sneer that the other three bands spent the rest of the night spitting all over the stage. The one exception—“YOU THINK YOU’RE SO COOOOOL!/YOU GOT AN APPETITE/FOR DESTRUCTION!” in “Jersey City”—proved that Klein can spit venom as nastily as anyone, but in the context of the rest of her music it felt out of place. Where Tomboy, Slutever, and Potty Mouth were in your face with middle fingers up, Klein was coy, withdrawn, almost distant, standing motionless at the mic with eyes closed, as if lost in her own world.
Hilly Eye’s is introverted music, make no question, but in its introversion it finds an expansiveness, a sort of coming-over-the-crest-of-a-hill-into-open-country-type grandiosity, which few bands ever manage—and with just two people, no less. Not for nothing is Klein, with her bushy brown locks falling often between her pasty-complected face and the audience, the spitting image of Jimmy Page’s little sister. Hilly Eye sounds to me, not musically per se but nonetheless kind of spiritually, rather like Led Zeppelin sans Robert Plant—which, speaking as I do from the side of the dark and mysterious and pissed-off, is definitely not a bad thing.
Then came the moment we all were waiting for: Potty Mouth, the one traditional four-person-lineup rock ‘n’ roll outfit of the night (blame it on the Recession, blame it on Death From Above 1979, but no matter the reason, basses have really been going out of style) climbed up onstage and picked up their instruments and started playing. I should come right out and admit two things right now: one, I love Potty Mouth so much that I named my blog after the opening lyrics of their EP, and this was the first time I’d ever seen them live; and two, I was on my fourth Narragansett and things were starting to get a little bit fuzzy. So this section of the review is not going to have all that much in the way of critical distancing, I’m afraid.
Suffice it to say that Potty Mouth were a blast. They nailed every note of their often surprisingly intricate jams, including their encore—”Dog Song,” which I requested via 3×5 index card, and which they claimed they hadn’t played in two months—and their energy was vicious and unflagging throughout. The brilliant split-screen effect of their one scuzzy-punk-type-guitar and one twangy-Ennio-Morricone-type-guitar sound hit me with a greater clarity than had ever come through on record, and yeah, I don’t really know what else to tell you except that it was great and and I’ll try and pay closer attention next time I see them, which will be when they roll through Cambridge (with Tomboy in tow) to headline day one of the Smash It Dead Fest at the Cambridge Elks Club in late March.