How many times have you had the opportunity to turn round to a perfect stranger and say: “I was in your house last month”.
I did.
To Marissa Paternoster.
The Don Giovanni showcase I reviewed last month was at the lead singer, guitarist of Screaming Females house (she has moved and not taken the mural from the basement) but I have never met her. After the SF’s professional and powerful pro-prog set, Marissa sells merchandise for the duration of the following Free Energy and Titus Andronicus sets.
I don’t speak to her again (though she does give me her VIP pass: probably in the vain hopes of getting rid of me) but I do watch her and she appears to be a pleasant, pretty young woman.
On stage tonight Marissa appears to be the bastard step child of an Amish farmer from the 1880s, the Salem witch trail and the bottle neck guitarist of your dreams as a howling banshee of romantic despair. There is a detached ferocity to Screaming Females as they visited new songs off their third album Castle Talk. Gone is the caterwauling What If Someone Is Watching Their TV? replaced by the invective of an early set “I Don’t Mind It”. And it is not that SF don’t play loud fast rules, or even live up to their names, it is that there isn’t all they do.
Marissa is a scary central point: she seems possessed because of a weird spectral visage but also because of her technically proficient screaming in tune which pierce and rips out the guts of a song like concert highlight “Laura And Marty”. Then she leans back on the rhythm section: drummer Jarrett Dougherty who I have raved about here before and bassist King Mike who was power chording himself like a man possessed tonight. They allow Marris to rip of electric finger picking near the top of the neck and almost physically eschew an all punk riffs attack. Those days are gone.
It’s a good, cool, professional rock set.