Female Rockers Contend for Dark Throne

The normalization of women-in-rock is this decade’s most important development in pop. But the Orange County scene has a bit more work to do on that count.

The whole world knows about our Gwen and our mutated strain of Gwen (a.k.a. Monique Powell of Save Ferris).

The challenge now is to hatch the Anti-Gwen. (Muffs fans might say the Anti-Gwen is already among us in the form of salty spitfire Kim Shattuck. But the Muffs had to go to Los Angeles to get respect.)

When the ska-schooled Stefani and Powell step on stage, girl-power becomes garrulous, all smiles and skipping around. Beth Carmellini and Jenni McElrath, front-women of the lively punk-pop band Red 5 coat their neuroses in chirpy tunefulness.

The accomplishments of those four have lately given female rockers a foothold on O.C. alterna-rock turf that had long been only slightly less hostile to female musicians than the Vienna Symphony.

Yet still we await the breakthrough of a local female rocker who can succeed while acting weird, nasty, miserable or desperate. We want music from every female personality manifestation Meredith Brooks imagined in her hit “Bitch,” except we’d like them manifested with a good deal more songwriting imagination than Brooks could muster.

When that happens, we’ll declare female normalization complete and stop doing retrograde paired reviews based on the performers’ gender.

“We’re all sick boys,” sings Mike Ness of Social Distortion in one of Orange County’s best-loved punk anthems. The five women of 4Gazm (they started out as a foursome) and Skie Bender, singer-lyricist of the otherwise male Fireants, have struck strong blows, though not quite knockout punches, for the right to rock as a sick girl.

4Gazm’s long-aborning debut CD is a shot of garagey punk rock, leaning toward snarling hard-core but flavored with enough dashes of musical sweetening (i.e., bits of tunefulness and melodic backing vocals) to keep it listenable for its suitably short, 27-minute running time.

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Maybe the lack of testosterone helps a hardcore band avoid getting carried away with sheer velocity. 4Gazm knows when to race ahead but also knows enough to downshift into the crunchy, heavy grooves that are so much more satisfyingly rockin’.

L7, the raw, all-female band from Los Angeles, comes to mind in this mixture of growling punk attitude and bits of melody, but “Here Kitty . . . “ brings back the dark-hued pummeling and drawled vocals of early T.S.O.L. and the anthemic liftoff of Bad Religion.

The best thing about 4Gazm is the depth it brings to lyrics about relationship power struggles, stuff that in male punks’ hands--or at least in immature male punks’ hands--is usually one-dimensional.

“Dirty Thoughts,” a same-sex lust number, is far sexier than the puerile schoolboy efforts of the likes of Home Grown and Blink 182. The song’s dark hues cast carnality as a mysterious force, not just a mindless animal need. Clear out, boys, and make way for some women.

“Get Me Off” casts singer Pamela (just Pamela) as a fierce sexual sadist--which might typically get handled with Cramps-like cartoonishness. She injects humor with a theatrical turn of voice but doesn’t turn the song into farce. Instead, she fuels it with palpable rage at the consequences of being on the fringe: “To my family I’m a [expletive] disgrace.”

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On other songs, she persuasively flips into the reverse role, playing the party in a love affair who is masochistic, manipulable, needy and obsessed. If Pamela has lived all she sings, she’s entitled to cover Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” with pride.

“She’s My,” a good, simple, Joan Jett-style slice of catchy rock, is about as happy as 4Gazm gets, and even then the imagined dream lover is, well, imaginary. And Pamela’s imagining tends toward something other than soft-focus romance: “For her I’m crazy, for her I’d kill.”

4Gazm does some ordinary punk things: The catchy “Prodigy” is a typical sneering put-down of a disengaged snob (“She has all the suggestions, but never any contributions/She’s daddy’s little prodigy”), and a couple of songs bog down in formulaic punk-polka slamming.

There’s no hint that the band has the courage to let down its tough veneer and show naked vulnerability. (I recall Pamela doing a guest slot somewhere and showing a good, expansive singing voice far beyond the stylized, combative bark she uses here.) Still, there’s depth and insight on “Here Kitty,” along with enough ferocity to give most guy-bands something to shoot for.

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The Fireants’ Bender reaches back to one of rock’s earliest and greatest strong-female role models, Patti Smith. Like Smith, she began as a poet and veered into song. Also like Smith, she favors a sing-speak delivery but can carry a tune (not to rank Bender’s limited singer’s voice with Smith’s gloriously expressive one).

“Congratulations,” the showstopper on “Coping Mechanism,” borrows some cadences and inflections from “Land,” Smith’s epic masterpiece from the 1975 album “Horses.”

“Congratulations” is Bender’s most fully realized expression of her most persistent theme, sick obsession. In this case, the narrator is an insane stalker consumed with a dangerous combination of unrequited love and bottled-up anger. Bender humanizes her character in telling moments of prayer and nightmarish narrative in which God, rescuer and medicinal cure are called upon but prove absent or ineffective.

The seven-minute “Congratulations” would be a minor masterpiece in its own right if the Fireants had cut it off at the frantically climactic moment--”There’s broken glass, so watch your step”--instead of lingering on for a repetitive chorus that adds nothing and lets the song sputter out (“Land” also subsides but without losing tension and impact).

Along with an overriding sense of dejection--”Nothing good ever lasts” and “The world in my pocket is ultimately empty” are the clinching lines of the first two songs--the Fireants offer moments of release, notably “24 Hour Diner,” a wry look at life as a broke Bohemian in which Bender employs an Ani DiFranco-ish light theatricality.

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The band and crack producer Eric “E” Garten keep the sound clean, vital and varied. Guitarist Kevin Jacobs shows a sure hand in many styles, including the old-line arena-rock riffing of “24 Hour Diner”; the R.E.M.-ish jangling on the emotive bridge of “Evaporate”; the Appalachian (via Violent Femmes) death-balladry and rocked-up flamenco of “Long Ago”; some funky Creedence-style swamp-rock on “Sun Go Down” and dollops of big, fat Black Sabbath and Soundgarden-style hard-rock pounding here and there.

The intensity and focus wane in the homestretch, but the highlights on this, the Fireants’ much-improved second album, unmistakably bear the mark of the Anti-Gwen.

(Available from Veags Records, P.O. Box 2175, Newport Beach, CA 92659, (714) 289-9498 or E-mail vegasrec@aol.com; and from Firestarter Records, 8884 Warner Ave., Suite 154, Fountain Valley, CA 92708, (714) l848-5355 or E-mail fireants@gte.net)

* 4Gazm, Teen Heroes, Female Chauvinist Pigs and the Keepers play tonight at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. (714) 533-1286.

Ratings range * (poor) to **** (excellent), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.