Seven Song Spin: Women With Axes

In the past few months I've begun to recognize that I have a musical type—or rather, another musical type, alongside Belle Epoque French composers, Czech string writing, South Asian dub, et al. Put simply, my new fave flavor is electric guitar power pop with a female singer. This is hardly a new taste of mine—I can point to Liz Phair or Throwing Muses or Sam Phillips or PJ Harvey for antecedents—but somewhere around the time I started to binge Faye Webster and Madison Cunningham, the algorithms of Spotify and/or Pandora exposed me to a gaggle of new bands, and now there's a constellation of them in my playlists, ranging from Adia Victoria to Big Thief, from Juana Molina to Snail Mail.

I've honed in on three artists among whom I hear a clear affinity, each of whom deserve and will probably get their own posts at some point. I've put more or less their entire catalogues on a playlist (with a few extras) and have been shuffling among them with great contentment. Here are 2 cuts from each, plus a bonus.

This full playlist can be found here.

A sudden strength: I've joked that the Philly trio Queens of Jeans must have been engineered in a lab to match my tastes. But listening again to the first song on their first self-titled 2016 EP, "Dance (Get Off Your Ass)," I think that glib formulation sells them a bit short. It's clear that Queen of Jeans has redefined and clarified a whole frontier of my tastes, much as Rufus Wainwright or Dirty Projectors or Madison Cunningham did previously. Yes, I have long been drawn to jangly, twangy guitars, as well as to girl-group harmonies, but it's not like this band is just checking off boxes I had readymade. They strike some retro chords, no doubt, and are heartily redolent of many other sounds—lead singer Miriam Devora has cited the Ronettes and Roy Orbison as influences, and those aren't far off. But with this indelible throwdown, a sort of mission statement for the band, they staked out a whole realm of sound, and it has only unfolded gloriously from there.

Uncharted gardens: Indeed I haven't yet heard a Queen of Jeans song I don't at least like, and most of them I love unreservedly. While their first full-length LP, Dig Yourself, is chock full of brilliance (in particular the cheeky "UR My Guy"), their 2019 collection If You're Not Afraid, I'm Not Afraid is a true arrival, a heart-stopping masterpiece. I struggled to choose just one fine cut to share; I settled on "Bloomed," a big, bold, two-guitar banger that shows both the band's continuity with and growth beyond "Dance."

Tender in the bedroom: Another guitar heroine who deserves her own post—and about whom I've also previously joked that her sound could have been made in a lab to suit my taste—is Britpop genius Charlotte Hatherley. If you haven't heard her catchy, slipped-time-signature pop gem "Bastardo," correct that now.

Loneliest planet: That song appeared on her perfect debut record from 2004, Grey Will Fade, which she followed with a more tentative but still essential collection, The Deep Blue. (Her last full-guitar record—she's made some intriguing synth-based pop in the years since—was 2009's great New Worlds). One gem from Deep Blue is "It Isn't Over," which gives you a sense of the expanse and eccentricity of her hooky but restless songcraft.

Shrinks don't work: I already shared the most transfixing song by the Dutch band the Mysterons, "Turkish Delight," in this space. This is my second favorite of their rich but too small catalog, which comprises just an eponymous EP and the 2017 LP Meandering (they seem to be defunct now; see below.) "Sold My Medicine" has some of their patented mix of funk, prog, pop, and lead singer Josephine von Schaik's Bollywood-esque vocals.

The silk of night: The same singer has resurfaced as Josephine Odhil, and though she doesn't seem to have any full releases, she's got some live tracks on YouTube. "Moonwater" finds her in fine, hypnotic form.

Made of delicate sugar: This is one is an outlier from the pop/rock sounds above, but I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the 2020 release I got the most sustenance from. And while Waxahatchee's Saint Cloud is another girl-and-guitar record, it's much closer to an Americana vein that is another strong subset of my tastes. "Lilacs" captures the yearny, gritty, vulnerable, soulful sound of that essential record as well as any track on it.