The Magik Markers are two women on guitars with a guy behind the drums who sound like they got really into Teenage Jesus and the Jerks while it was playing on the bar jukebox between screamo hardcore bands. They pound and pound away at their instruments, making a loud rock racket with the crushing sounds coming out of their broken amps. Vocalist Elisa Ambrogio doesn't scream and squeeze out her vitriol like Lydia Lunch does, instead packaging it in rants, like a less lucid (or less preplanned) Miranda July. Their music is at its most intense when Ambrogio's staccato spoken delivery melds with some harsh karate chops to the guitar and primal drum pounding to create a massive convulsion, and they reach that effect quite a few times on this hour long CD.
At the beginning of the CD, "White Bikini" sounds as if it was recorded from down the hall. Sweeping feedback brushstrokes sound like some big dumb beast preparing for a feast. As the guitar reaches more of a fury and the volume picks up, Ambrogio's lazy feminist pontifications gain intensity as her tone and rhythm starts to match with the fast guitar. When the drums come in during the last few minutes of this fourteen minute song, what had been freeflowing improvisation and noise turns into something more like no wave. Ambrogio's stream of conciousness gets to the song's title, "I don't want teenage girls in their bikinis," turning "white bikini" into a near chorus as she intertwines it with a stutter-step from the drums.
"Just a Child" also starts off deceptively quiet, as Ambrogio rants some nonsense about the prevalence of "diabetes in the African American community" (...so bizarre). But after that, the band congeals into some sort of proto-surf rock groove, with the drummer keeping a fast pace with a few Wipeout-style fills and the lead guitar tossing out random shards, repeating them to form riffs. As the song decomposes and the space opens up, Ambrogio sounds like she is arguing with her parents over an embarassing moment from her childhood when she found a box of sex toys.
"Hero For Our Times" (broken into two parts) is a direct assault on the rock patriarchy. Ambrogio wails out "You're not the king of rock and roll" as the drummer creates a bass drum-heavy primal pattern. While part one packages the rant and pounding into a chorus-like free rock song, part two breaks it all apart again, devolving into a thrashing, pounding, clanging clutter of debris.
It's wrong to call the Magik Markers no wave and it's wrong to call them noise. While no wave is itself a deconstruction, if anything, the Magik Markers are deconstructing it one more iterative step. The entire discography of Teenage Jesus could almost fit inside "White Bikini," "Hero For Our Times," or "Just a Child," and the Magik Markers use that whole space to find the neurotic tick, agititate it and build it up to a fever pitch, and then convulse.
