Female Genius

The members of Female Genius have been making uncompromising music for decades. In the runout groove of the group’s 2021 self-titled debut LP, the etching reads: Female genius for a better tomorrow. Tomorrow is today and today echoes forwards and backwards in time. That being said, most of Female Genius started making art during the first flowering of the post-punk aesthetic, absorbing disparate disciplines and farflung influences into, first, their visual art practices, and later the boundary-defying music that they pursued during the 1980s and into the present day. The new Female Genius album Jagged and Fractured is a crown jewel in the discography of its members—Julie Hair, founding member of 3 Teens Kill 4, Live Skull and later Bite Like A Kitty; Marnie Jaffe, a founding and longtime member of Live Skull; Nikki D’Agostino, who plays in Art Gray Noizz Quintet and Vestments; and new addition Janice Sloane, an early member of notorious Downtown noise group Missing Foundation. Hair sings, plays bass, synth and auxiliary percussion; Jaffe sings, plays synth and percussion; Sloane plays guitar, while D’Agostino plays the saxophone and an EWI (electronic wind instrument). 

On Jagged and Fractured, Female Genius pulls off a masterful trick—even though they are essentially beatless, they harness all the dramatic power of a loud rock band. Despite the lack of traditional drums, the songs are suffused with tension, using electronic textures and the precise placement of sounds to keep matters moving. Hair and Jaffe’s voices intertwine, gaining power as the words coil around each other. Existential dread hovers above these songs, but also acts as a blanket—comforting and smothering in equal measure. There is something luxurious about the unfurling nature of these songs—the music appears like smoke and fog rolling down a deserted city street. Female Genius specialize in set and setting, conjuring a shrouded landscape to get lost in; that the disorientation is welcomed is what gives it such strange power. 

“Back of a Building” comes in like a curse, contemplating decay and its effects on a stable life. ”We live in the shock/We live in the doubt,” they sing, processing the turbulent emotions that give an outline to a life led in the grip of creative mania. The jazzy bassline that drives “Like A Stone” gets enveloped by D’Agostino’s film noir sax, invoking an atmosphere dense with portent. “Bell Shaped Head” finds Hair and Jaffe’s voices blending together into something like an adult nursery rhyme as the music slinks along self-assuredly, with a synth stalking the outskirts and Sloane’s guitar line chiming in like an exotic bird. The main characteristic of “Made of Marble” is descension, into the fetid pit of profit and exploitation. Female Genius tells us an obvious if profound truth—”Banks are made of marble/Money’s only paper.” All ticking clocks and distorted riffs, “Century Psycho” is the most explicit threat on Jagged and Fractured as the voices call out and accuse—”We are all murderers.” “I Was Wrong” is the sound of pacing, an attempt to exhaust the regret, to harness the guilt and turn it into an outwardly bound force. “Europe and China” closes the proceedings with an unsettling finality that sends shivers down the spines of the old empires. 

— Erick Bradshaw 

Spin Age Blasters with Creamo Coyl 

on WFMU