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Just to get it out of the way: this Marnie Stern chick is fairly hot. This “fairly hotness” stacks with impressive guitar skill, chronic insomnia that adds that lunatic bent to her music—especially obvious on album opener Prime and parts of Ruler—and you wind up with a woman who I’ll describe now, instead, as super fucking hot.

Marnie Stern is super fucking hot. Her album, titled This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, is fucking awesome all the way through. There isn’t a weak track on it, her songs range between a variety of styles and influences, all of it sounding distinctly her own but when she turns up the Hard Rock knob for The Crippled Jazzer it’s unmistakable and awesome.

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Her songwriting is, for the most part, nonsense stream of consciousness garbage, but she admits to that in the first song. Her strength lies in combining great verses with hooks and riffs that sound like what she’s singing about feeling. A song like The Package is Wrapped demonstrates the great emotionality (I’m going to use this word to describe music forever and ever) of Marnie Stern’s music. Maybe I’m crazy, but I just connect to this song. The rolling “you rea-rea-range your mind” coupled with the funky sliding feeling of the verses, which is used to great effect at 2:57 right after “is there no way out of my mind?” to bring me quite possibly my favorite moment on the whole album. How it is that her singing “I see beautiful and shimmering signs” right after that is the greatest thing I’ve heard in a while, I don’t know, but it is.

This is an album full of great moments. The ‘ey! ‘ey! ‘ey!s on Ruler floor me every time. Or when Prime really kicks off and Marnie Stern’s voice and guitar seem to hit the exact same pitch and note and you’re not really sure if it’s Marnie singing or her guitar wailing. The chorus of Transformer, while sounding like a feminist anthem of some kind, is enlightening. When the rolls of Shea Stadium break into the first verse and it’s like clouds parting…

It just doesn’t get much better than this, people.

I love you, Marnie Stern. Even if you weren’t fairly hot I would love you.