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MARIANNE
NOWOTTNY:
BETTER—AND WEIRDER—THAN CAT POWER
By Joe S. Harrington
Marianne
Nowottny can eat. Unlike those other anorexic twigs posing
as chanteuses, she ain’t afraid to snap on the old feedbag
once and a while. They don’t call her “DJ Giblets and Gravy”
for nothing! I once witnessed her devour a sampling of
Japanese delicacies—sushi and the like—and then send out
for the whoopie pies immediately thereafter. For those unfamiliar
with these confectionaries (which are completely different
from “moon pies,” believe me), they consist of two moist
cakes with a dollop o’ tasty cream in the center (of varying
consistency and volume depending on the baker). Whoopie
pies are apparently a New England regional specialty and
we have some good ones up here in Portland, Maine where
I live—Sarah’s make the best, but they’re only available
at Joe’s Smoke Shop and by the time Ms. Nowottny needed
dessert Joe’s was closed so she had to settle for another
lousy brand (cake’s too dry, with a way-too-shrimpy portion
of synthetic-tasting cream). Speakin’ of Joe’s, the brilliant
singer-keyboardist actually accompanied yours truly to that
very place the same afternoon to buy liquid supplies—I believe
at the time, Ms. Nowottny took note of Sarah’s whoopie pies
but made no instant decisions because we had some DRINKING
to do and Ms. Nowottny also does that well. She even got
to sample our excellent SHIPYARD beer which we pride ourselves
so much on up here in the great state of Maine along with
lobsters and potatoes. But of course the whole point is,
Marianne Nowottny is also a big fan of lobster and potato—and
beer. Doesn’t smoke the butts (they’re bad for the pipes),
but she’s run through her share of anything and everything
in the course of her 19 very wise years…
Which
is kind of the whole point—she can eat, she can drink, and
she can even cook! Being of Germanic distinction, Marianne’s
mum is also a great chef who heartily recommends steaming
buckets of broth filled with aromatic sausages and the like—infact
Marianne’s even helping her out at the family restaurant
this summer during her break from college. So some lucky
guy is getting his weinerschnitzel handcooked by the greatest
fucking American female artist since Billie Holiday. And
the comparisons to Lady Day are not unfounded—the whole
point of running down a virtual checklist of everything
Ms. Nowottny consumed in the course of one seven-hour period
is to acknowledge her immense appetite, not just
for beer or whoopie pies, but also for life itself.
What else could make her sound like, even at the tender
age of nineteen, she’s lived a thousand lifetimes? They
say Lady Day herself was a fried chicken fancier and my
favorite Billie story is the one about how, one day, she
hand-swiped a bunch of “college boys.” Marianne comes from
the same spirit and you can hear it in her music, which
is what makes it so spine-tinglingly intense as opposed
to just more mawkish folk music in “feminist” garb. In
all seriousness, Marianne Nowottny’s the most important
female artist in any category—that is, she’s doing
more to expand the whole concept of modern womanhood—than
anyone since Lisa “Suckdog” Carver. Infact it’s pretty
evident they’re cut from the same cloth.
To wit: upon once proffering Ms. Suckdog
with a whole shopping bag full of my famous handcooked popcorn
as a party favor for one of her soirees (clothing optional)
she instinctively dove her hand in and grabbed a big handful
without the normal trepidation displayed by uptight alt-rock
ladies worried about their figures. At that moment, it kind
of dawned on me—this was emblematic of her whole APPROACH
to life, which was a zestful popcorn-dive of almost Nietzschean
proportions! The first time I heard the Shell is Swell
album—which was Marianne’s fab collaboration with Donna
Bailey in the form of the short-lived and ill-fated Shell
duo—I was immediately reminded of Lisa Suckdog. Not even
the recorded stuff like Drugs are Nice or the compilation
Onward Suckdog Soldiers but the background “incidental”
music in the Lost Kittens video, the strangely disorienting
stuff that actually sounds like an offshoot of Yoko Ono.
You know, there’s weird and then there’s weird and
I’ve always gone for the latter, and somethin’ about the
fact that in both the case of Suckdog and Shell it was literally
teenage semen-sprouts yawkin’ up the abysmal meow made it
all the more appetizing. Shell is Swell to me seemed
like a record every teenage girl of Prozac Nation should
be listening to religiously—no Prozac for the “pasty princess”
however: just bring on the goddamn fried clams before she
gets writer’s block!
Getting back to whoopie pies: Iggy
Pop, the famed ex-singer of the Stooges, and human specimen,
is a known whoopie pie fancier. But there was no Pop or
pies evident on Shell is Swell but some downright
macabre mellotron sizzle combined with a disarming Nico
Marble Index vocal style—Marianne is the definition
of “noir-ish.” She’s a little like Diamanda, but not so
much into screech as purr…but it’s a purr of a blur, like
a cat caught in the downturn of a certified tuff gnarl.
Cat power? Shell was so UNLIKE the previously-vaunted “women
in rock” suspects that it was the most ear-opening piece
o’ wax since Love Child’s immortal Witchcraft and
the best expose of the modern female id since vintage Suckdog.
Even tho’ the alb reeked o’ self-conscious girliness—an
unavoidable facet of life in the nineties admittedly—there
was apocalypse within its eternal ginchiness. Despite the
purposely-garish pink and black sleeve, the handwrit inscriptions
were more reminiscent of tombstone etchings than they were
feckless love notes. You gotta fuckin’ respect teenagers
who ain’t total ginchos in this day and age and Shell for
once presented us with perfect role models. Back in the
early nineties, Spin asked Simpsons creator
Matt Groening what music Bart Simpson listened to and he
replied: “NWA, Dead Milkmen, Butthole Surfers, anything
to drive his parents crazy.” In this day and age, if someone
asked Craig McCracken, the creator of the Powerpuff Girls,
that same question per his own illustrious band
o’ pre-teen public defenders (who’re actually just a derivative
o’ Rocky the Flying Squirrel anyway) I have no doubt he’d
say Shell as well as Marianne’s own socket-pumping solo
works.
And
what works they are, starting with the immortal Afraid
of Me, which came out on the great Abaton imprint in
1999. Marianne Nowottny records exclusively for Abaton
and the artists alone decide what you will hear on their
Abaton recordings! Marianne is their flagship artist—hell,
at this point, Marianne is their only artist! But
that’s just an example of good old staying power. Let’s
face it, two out of three albums released by Sub Pop or
Merge totally sucks and the mistake o’ most indie
labels is that they spread themselves too thin. Abaton will
never do that because they have a vision and that vision
is a family affair with the front-line o’ the illustrious
Abaton royal family consisting o’ the beautiful and talented
Lauri Bortz (America’s greatest playwright) and her hubster
Mark Dagley (a creator of eye-popping visual art in his
own right). In the seventies, Mark actually chopped away
for the Girls, Boston-area pre-Mission of Burma weird-rock,
so he’s no stranger to embryonic sounds and it’s his knob-twirling
that helps bring Nowottny’s unique vision to life. Lauri’s
listed as “producer” but that’s kind of like Andy Warhol
being listed as “producer” of the Velvet Underground’s first
album and in fact Lauri’s very Warholian: just like Warhol
wouldn’t go out w/out his wig, sunglasses or black leather
jacket, Lauri is seldom if ever seen outside of the Abaton
compound without one of her forties dresses, a pillbox hat
and her lethally-red lipstick.
Nowottny’s
no slouch fashion-wise either—look at the cover of Afraid
of Me where she looks like a combination of Lolita and
Marlene Dietrich. She got the red lips from Lauri, but
the whole key is her strange juxtapositioning of old/young
and even tho’ she was a mere SIXTEEN when she waxed this
opus she once again sounds wise beyond her years. And speakin’
of “key,” this alb also contains the fuggin’ great “Porcelain
Key,” a song rife with almost Biblical analogies in which
the stunning chanteuse sings: “Worn down to an apple core/I
can now honestly say I don’t need anymore.” Apples are of
course edible (if not Oedipal in this case) which once again
brings up the food angle! Other references to food on this
album include: “lamb” is mentioned in “The Bell Ringer”
(a skin-tingling opus with Diamanda overtones about a would-be
Romeo-Quassimodo); she mentions “soda pop” in “Lotus” and
also “glass of sherry with a cherry”; in “Deep End” she
evokes “sugar cubes” (which of course could be a DRUG REFERENCE
as well since smack pops up in the aforementioned “Porcelain
Key” as well as “Crackerjack Necrophiliac”—how’s that for
a food/death metaphor?) Jesus Christ, I just realized she
also mentions “crabs” in “Deep End”—wonder if she’s ever
been to Maryland, birthplace o’ not only the crab phenomenon
but also Eric Youngling who, despite her Aryan lineage,
was no fan of the so-called “pasty princess” (so dubbed
by some critic who apparently took note of her pale complexion—but
then aren’t all those “moon goddesses,” from Deitrich
to Nico, always pale as a ghost? Pasty’s nothin’ if not
macabre but it’s kind of touching that below it all she’s
just a good old American teenager who actually drives—they
call her car “the Pasty mobile”—and once even worked at
Burger King…which once again brings up the FOOD angle so
everything connects…)?
Her
food references ain’t as blatant as the Descendents’ or
Iggy’s but nods to all kinds of consumable substances pop
up if y’ just know where to look. “Who’s to Blame,” for
instance, starts right off with a ref to “yolks” but that
may be the oxen-securing kind as opposed to eggs—then again,
I might have spoken too soon since she sings in the third
verse: “Hearts break like hollow eggshells.” She also sings:
“maybe we can drink tonight” and who wouldn’t want to tip
a few distilled spirits with the current World’s Greatest
Chanteuse?
Food reference number 434: on “Harbor”
she mentions “cookies” but only in the context of “I’m still
your communist cookie nazi,” which should finally satisfy
Youngling’s Aryan yearnings.
Not as much food mentioned on her
latest, the epic Manmade Girl, which has got to be
the most brilliant double alb since, I dunno, Brylcreem
Nation? One half of it’s her new songs and they’re all
brilliant and even more smoky and obscure and dense than
the ones on Afraid of Me. This was the alb where
she REALLY showed herself to be the heir apparent to Diamanda
as well as wayward sixties songstresses like Patty Waters
n’ Erika Pomeranz n’ Sandy Hurvitz as well as more recent
ones like Azalia Snail. But whereas Snail conjures her blissful
space-hum via the six-string ala Barbara Manning—which means
it’s still ultimately FOLK MUSIC—Nowottny uses purely
keyboards (altho’ Dagley as well as Nowottny herself does
occasionally embellish a track or two with guit-sounds).
The end result, on this album anyway, is a musical pastiche
that, at various times, manages to evoke Sun Ra, Billie
Holiday, Erik Satie, Nico, Yma Sumac, Richard Clayderman,
Richard Grossman, Patti Smith, Patty Waters, and Anisette
from Savage Rose, among others. It’s the greatest album
of the new millennium without a doubt if “greatest” means
the only thing offering a genuine challenge to the
listener. The whole second disk is semi-classical pianistics
combined with hovering space burble worthy o’ Acid Mothers
Temple. Manmade Girl is also Nowottny’s waltz towards
full-blown womanhood—if you’ve got a teenager niece and
you want to indoctrinate her to the ways of Nowottny you
start her out with the more teen-friendly Shell is Swell
and the sometimes-giddy Afraid of Me before exposing
her to this because, chances are, she won’t understand it.
It’s not as immediately “accessible” as those two albs,
in other words, but twice as rewarding once you’ve bought
the full-blown farm.
Which brings us to Nobody’s Diary: A Tribute to
Yazoo. Judging by the title the whole shebang sounds
like a tribute to that blues label so I thought I
was gonna get to hear Pasty doing things like “I Want a
Hotdog for My Roll” etc. My first thought was: “Where’s
Grumpus?” But then I realized, far from being a tribute
to any arcane Americana, it’s actually a tribute to some
English synth-pop duo from the eighties named Yazoo who
had to chop the two O’s off the end o’ their name t’ make
‘em fit for American consumption coz apparently the blues
label balked. Hence: Yaz. I never heard of ‘em in the eighties
since my tastes at that time ran more along the lines of,
I dunno, the Angry Samoans…in that case, I have nothing
to compare the blatantly “new wave” emissions here to, but
let’s just say, on this effort—made up of mostly artists
I’ve never heard of—the snap drums are running wild. Eighties
affectations have been rampant lately, whether it’s the
contrived robotics of the Faint or the new Republican politics.
Marianne’s cut, “I Before E Except After C” is the only
cut here that’s not self-consciously retro: through a sandblast
suction cup o’ sound filters—once again wrought by Bortz
and Dagley w/ some help from experimental genie Elliot Sharp—the
Pasty One mouths a sultry series of echoing atmospherics
complete with tonal protrusions that recall Eno during his
most pastoral period. Compare this cut to the moveable disco
of Electrosquad’s “Only You,” which directly succeeds it,
for a prime examp of how, even in a project as self-consciously
unnatural as this, the Pasty Princess never succumbs to
generic mediocrity. Not that Nobody’s Diary ain’t
utterly wonderful throughout—in fact, it’s by far
the best snapdrum alb since the last New Order. I almost
hate to admit it, but I’ve been kind of nostalgic for the
eighties (yes, Reagan, MTV…those eighties) lately.
Let’s face it, compared to nowadays, anything’s better.
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