★★★★★
If you've ever read Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, you have a sense of what life as an indie (or "punk" or "alternative" or whatever the label de jour was) band was a rough-hewn thing thirty years ago. Before there were well-worn circuits of small and mid-size clubs, major indie labels and a decent chance that you heard about Yo La Tengo from NPR, bands not interested in or too idiosyncratic for the major label system pretty much had to figure things out themselves, booking...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-06-15
★★★★★
I've always gotten a certain sly satisfaction from the fact that the name of the sole woman and most visible member of New Jersey's Screaming Females is literally Latin for "our father". Marissa Paternoster is indeed a force of nature worthy of being a patriarch, matriarch or any other sort of progenitor for a rock band you could think of but the last year wasn't easy on dear old, err, dad...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
Maybe the most impressive thing about Screaming Females - besides leading lady Marissa Paternoster's well-documented shredding chops - is the consistency of the group's output. Since lunging out of New Brunswick, New Jersey's sweaty-basement party scene in 2006, the trio has released five full-length studio albums, not a clunker among them. On Chalk Tape, their second studio EP, the Females continue to solidify their reputation for delivering wickedly efficient DIY rock...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2013-03-20
★★★★★
Screaming Females compensate for one half of its moniker not being entirely accurate-- two-thirds of the New Jersey trio is male, after all-- by redoubling its efforts on the other half. Last year's Steve Albini-produced Ugly was a ferocious post-punk, post-90s, post-patience for your sorry ass guitar-rock record. It sprawled like a double gatefold classic rock LP, but the tone was intensely, if not narrowly, aggressive...
- pitchfork.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
The tag on Screaming Females has always been that you have to see them live to fully appreciate them, their studio records being mere placeholders. This is generally a backhanded compliment, a nice way of saying that the energy of the live performance will hopefully allow you to ignore the fact that these guys don't have anything resembling an actual song...
- www.cokemachineglow.com
2012-05-21
★★★★★
The Screaming Females story begins with sweaty, ask-a-punk gigs in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at such dank, quasi-legal basements as Meat Town USA. As the tale goes, drummer Jarrett Dougherty suffered from tendonitis during the band's infancy, which barred him from drumming for weeks on end...
- pitchfork.com
2012-04-26
★★★★★
It's nice to know a woman as talented as singer-guitarist Marissa Paternoster was influenced by Our Band Could Be Your Life, despite Kim Gordon being the only woman in it. And Paternoster forges her axe with the urgency of someone determined not to be missed in the next round-up for rock icons of her generation. She covers a lot of ground, in fact, from the Jack-White-you're-next powerdrill of "Doom 84" to the pointillist bubblegum of "Help Me...
- thephoenix.com
2012-04-19
★★★★★
This New Brunswick, NJ trio's fifth and best album to date was produced by Steve Albini, and he provides the band with a sharp, clear and muscular showcase for their fierce blend of Sleater-Kinney punk-rock, aggressive post-punk and classic hard-rock, placing in stark relief the band's limber yet ferocious rhythm section and Marissa Paternoster's fiery, inventive guitar work and wailing, vibrato-laden vocals.
- kexp.org
2012-04-16
★★★★★
It's kind of insane how much Screaming Females improve with each record. 2010's Castle Talk was a stellar punky effort from the band with a few classic rock guitar moments. Talk's follow-up, Ugly, gloriously ups the ante on Marissa Paternoster's many guitar tricks. It's almost a cliché at this point to call each Screaming Females album the group's best, but that's a good thing. But first, can we talk about Steve Albini for a sec...
- www.punknews.org
2012-04-16
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