The article everyone is talking about!

So this article was written about us after our Chicago show. There are some inaccuracies but apparently this woman is kind of a famous journalist. At least 2 people have told us that they came to see us because of her article (which means that others have probably come for the same reason and just not told us). So here it is. Look to the link for the whole article (including Abe Vigoda from LA who we rocked with in Seattle.

WHEN SCREAMING FEMALES hit Ronny's in mid-July, they had a paying crowd of six. I'm not counting the people in the other band or the sound guy, who was playing Tetris on his cell phone. They were halfway through a two-and-a-half-month U.S. tour with stops at plenty of basements and punk spaces -- a few days earlier they'd played a house show in Elgin. But though these three under-20 kids from New Jersey are almost entirely unknown, word is spreading fast. Front woman Marissa Paternoster is the teenage girl-guitarist messiah, and miracles and conversions come with the territory -- show by show, she's turning the uninitiated, myself included, into true believers.

We may be witnessing the dawn of a new age of femme shredders (Marnie Stern, Aimee Argote of Des Ark), but Paternoster isn't waiting around to see if anyone else is following her. On a defiant, punk-fast version of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer," she carved into the song until practically the whole thing was a solo. Screaming Females have just self-released their second album, What If Someone Is Watching Their TV?, and it can match any (decent) Dinosaur Jr record, pound for pound, in teen malaise and ripping solos. Paternoster's got some blues boogie in her riffing, a little Billy Gibbons in her muscular punk. She's a deft songwriter, but she doesn't like to let more than a minute or two go by without stepping on a stomp box and firing one off. She ended the set in a cloud of feedback scree, hunched over her guitar and pounding on her pedals with her fists. I don't think anything like her has happened to punk before, and I'm glad it finally has.

-Jessica Hopper

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/musicreviews/2007/070803/

Then this other dude showed up in Austin because of the above article and wrote an article about us. I knew he was a journalist without him even having to say it. Is it a bad thing that I am starting to be able to smell rock journalists? Again the whole article is in the link.

But almost all of this ended up being moot, as Screaming Females took the “stage” (a corner of the Parlor’s East North Loop location) and floored everyone.

A power trio of Rutgers students past and present, Screaming Females features an excellent male rhythm section (bassist - Rickenbacker bass, Wookie-sized, wore overalls and seemingly nothing else; drummer - skinny, wearing glasses, hitting hard).

But the ringer is guitarist Marissa Paternoster, a tiny woman who managed to embody a couple of generations of guitar hero all at once. She and her G&L S-500 grooved on deceptively simple, art-punk riffs like the Wipers’ Greg Sage, wailed on noisy breakdowns like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and (most surprisingly) shredded and solo’ed like a miniature J. Mascis.

(Oh, and her scream is vintage Riot Grrl, reminicent of the from-the-uterus howl of Heavens To Betsy’s Corin Tucker before she calmed down in Sleater-Kinney.)

I’ve never seen anything quite like it and never seen a small, ad hoc audience so outta-nowhere floored at a set. Every other guitarist there seemed vaguely embarrassed to see her chops blend so well with a strong punk songwriting sense.

Afterward, Ben grabbed a bucket and told the crowd he was going to shake down each of them for gas money for the touring bands on the bill. We gladly coughed it up and ended up buying 2 LPs and a seven-inch single from the Females....

But Screaming Females….expect their name on hipster lips everywhere around South by Southwest. Guitar heroism this smart and fearless can’t stay too far underground for long.

-Joe Gross

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/music/entries/2007/08/13/party_garbage_under_pressure_s.html

We are chillin in Houston at a really nice cafe. Super Happy Fun Land is a magical place. We are playing there tonight. Jersey doesn't seem that far away anymore.

-jarrett D