Muscle
My House Is A Show
riverjonesmusic.bandcamp.com
Kathleen Hanna, the singer for Bikini Kill and original Riot Grrrl, did something important around the time the women in Muscle were born: She stopped asking permission from men to define who she was. She was angry and confrontational and sexy and funny, and she rocked.
Trailblazers like Hanna made bands like Muscle possible, yet Muscle is feminist in a completely different way than the Riot Grrrls. Kate Feldmann’s voice is a high, girlish coo; she sounds innocent, and she plays lyrically on the edge between innocence and experience. She enjoys the fruits of the last century’s feminism; she can take care of herself, but she is unabashedly girly. Muscle can be pop, they don’t have to wear black leather, and they still don’t give a damn about a bad reputation. The band name “Muscle” shouts empowerment, but the music can still have some soft edges.
Musically, there’s a lot of good old Iowa City dirt rock still going on. Coolzey (a.k.a. Zack Lint), token man in the band, adds some big distorted guitars and bombastic drumming. But the songwriting is subtle, poppy and inventive, and the way Feldmann swoops between notes and opens up in full throated crescendos is almost perfect.
I wonder what she means when she sings, “your son could never get a girl as pretty as me and after one mistake he is so much bigger than me … I have no plans for male relations” in “My House Is A Show.” But she makes you feel something complicated, something better than plain talk. In “When You Talk To Me” she sings about relationship ambiguity—“Are you trying to get closer when you lean in with your ear? Or is it really just the band’s so loud that you can’t even hear?”—but the prize of the song is the counterpoint close harmony in the background of its last minute.
Ultimately, Muscle is fun, hooky pop music just noisy enough to scare the citizens, and it’s the sly details, as when she predicts “We’d share shampoo” in the song “True,” that make you want to return to Muscle for repeated listens.
