photo by Hilary Stohs-Krause
[Editor's note: This feature previews the Screaming Females' show at The Sandbox on Saturday starting at 8 p.m. Openers are Noah's Ark Was a Spaceship, Video Ranger, The Wayward Little Satan Daughters and I Am the Navigator. Cover is $8. RSVP here.]
Punk rock band Screaming Females is teetering on the cusp of two distinct musical realms. Their perseverance has allowed the band to claw through five albums in six years while constantly touring, and it’s all under the brand of a DIY group. Now the Screamales’ determination is paying off. Their latest album, Ugly, released on Don Giovanni Records, is generating album-of-the-year buzz. Having Steve Albini (Nirvana, The Stooges, Pixies) engineer your record doesn’t hurt your cause.
If your typical punk rock LP is a vicious spin cycle of two-minute rapid-fire checker exchanges, then Ugly is an intricate, courageous valor of pre-meditated strategies that resemble the complexity and maturity of a game of chess.
Standing strong at 54 minutes, Ugly infuses blues and psychedelic blends to layer an already meaty punk rock base. With songs reaching the eight-minute mark, lead singer and guitarist Marissa Paternoster shreds through blazing guitar riffs while maintaining an audibly savory vocal output that is a fusion between Grace Slick and Karen O.
I caught up with bassist King Mike via phone outside of Washington D.C. to talk about the long, self-editing approaches going into Ugly and how the band still maintains a DIY policy.
“We were planning on doing this record in Chicago and we knew that it was going to be a huge investment,” says Mike has he takes a step outside of a restaurant due to its no cell phone policy. “So we wrote the songs, demoed them, rearranged them only to demo them again."
Mike says that preparation prior to recording was key, given that they had only 10 days to record in Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio. However, holding on to demos nearly a year and producing polished recordings was an unfamiliar experience for the band.
“Normally, when we have our songs ready, we immediately record them ourselves,” Mike says. “It was also different because we put a lot more money into this record. We just want to always be doing something cooler, you know, bigger things, ‘better’ things.”
While exploring unfamiliar territories in the recording studio, Mike says that the dynamic of touring will stay the same.
“We want to keep doing the same thing we’ve always been doing,” Mike says. “We want to keep playing at places that we think are cool and venues that are all ages… any place that we can go up and play loud and have fun.”
The demand for Screaming Females is on an all-time rise and the band simply cannot book every single show that they used to while simultaneously managing every other aspect of the group.
“We now have a booking agent, but Jarrett Dougherty (drummer) worked very close with him and talked about every single show before it’s booked,” Mike says. “We try and play with our friends and still try and book shows on our own, but in certain cities where the paperwork is a little too much, it’s nice to have an extra hand.”
Being in a band that was completely reliant on a DIY approach, there seems to be a mandatory urge for strong camaraderie, whether it be writing music or touring the country.
“We write the music together and really discuss all the arrangements before a song is complete,” Mike says. “We always are having fun and joking around together on tour. But to keep our sanity, we have our own little interests. Jarrett reads a lot of nonfiction, I read a lot of fiction and Marissa focuses a lot on her drawings.”
Marissa, the lead vocalist and guitarist, creates all of the album artwork for Screaming Females.
Mike describes Dougherty as a half bandmate, half band manager who, since the birth of the band, has made sure that everything produced by the band is never neglected or half-assed.
“Jarrett is the most together,” Mike says. “When we first started, he told us about his friends’ bands who only ever put out a CD-R and it would disappear. Right from the beginning, his idea of the first material we would release would be very real, you know, real packaging, a real record — something that if we didn’t get further than that, we would have something real to hold onto that’s everlasting.”
It could be said that the drive and determination is what has kept the band fueled long enough to catch a noteworthy amount of buzz to go past the unforeseeable future. Mike also reiterated a lesson learned from Albini while they were in the studio with him.
“He (Albini) said, ‘If this is your job, you can’t be afraid to work,’ and I think that we have a very similar attitude,” Mike says. We’re going to work very hard. It’s the only thing we have as far as self-fulfillment. It’s all that we want to be doing with our lives and we’re going to keep on doing it.”
Steven is a Hear Nebraska contributor. Check these guys out at the Sandbox and piss on the walls while you watch some good rock 'n' roll. Reach Steven at stevena@hearnebraska.org.