Noun, Holy Hell
Featured Album
The riff-rocking solo debut from Screaming Females' leading lady
Marissa Paternoster is best known as the howling, shredding frontwoman of Screaming Females. Holy Hell, though, is effectively her first solo record — she's been making considerably more subdued recordings on her own under the name Noun since before Screaming Females began. "Subdued" is relative, of course: She sings almost everything here in a full-throated Kristin Hersh bellow, and most of these songs are plenty aggressive by anyone else's standards. "Outer Space" and "So Rough," for instance, are both rip-snorting riff-rockers where half the fun is the way Paternoster pits a bunch of monstrously nasty guitar tones against each other, and "Talk" lets individual distorted chords bloom over its duration like clouds of dust. But we also get to hear a slightly less axe-crazy version of her songwriting — there are a few songs built around the sound of a boxy old piano. Religion's never too far from the surface of Paternoster's lyrics here — a lot of these songs circle around the idea of the afterlife. The oddest feature of the album, though, is two consecutive mixes of the slinky, grimy "Brother," the first slightly more restrained than the second. What could it mean? That what we're supposed to be paying attention to is Paternoster's timbres more than her tunes? That she's particularly proud of that song? That her steel-wool guitar sound on it is worth hearing twice in a row?
