Mother Mary

Last fall, Sister Mary Rotten Crotch scored the opening slot for Le Tigre’s show at The Bottleneck, an assignment that seemingly reflected riot grrrls’ call for sisterhood across all boundaries. Sister Mary plays fire-spitting streetpunk, whereas Le Tigre wants fans to dance to its revolution. Head Tigre Kathleen Hanna scrawled “slut” across her midriff during her stint in the punk quartet Bikini Kill in an effort to deaden the impact of the terms used to label sexually aggressive women — Sister Mary unironically uses terms such as “whore” as insults in its lyrics. Still, despite such obstacles as drummer Amy Farrand’s smashed left hand (she’d slammed it in a car door) and guitarist Alison Saunders’ lead-heavy arms (a phenomenon she attributes to “menstrual relapse”), Sister Mary smoked, stunning the crowd of doe-eyed, Hello Kitty-adorned hipsters with its ferocious speed and singer Liz Nord’s starving-caged-animal prowl. By earning the respect of a crowd that viewed its set merely as something to endure before basking in the presence of its deity, Sister Mary made a positive impression on Hanna, who rushed back to New York to inform her followers about Kansas City’s unique brand of female empowerment.

Or not. “She just absolutely despised us,” Saunders reports. “She turned her back when we walked off the stage, refused to speak to us at all and refused to say our name. We just counted it as a victory. I think it’s funnier that she hates us than it would be if we had befriended the riot grrrl.”

While the group might have failed to turn Hanna into a Crotch crusader, it has inspired some unlikely conversions. At a benefit show last year at El Torreon, Nord stepped off the stage to serenade a squirming schoolteacher with “Pussy,” a double-entendre-heavy Lords of Acid tune that pays transparent tribute to a cat. Show me your pussy roars the chorus, a request Nord repeated to the teacher in a conversational tone. “She loved it,” Saunders marveled, although she notes that another instructor who enjoyed the set felt the group gave children a bad example. Citing Sister Mary’s song “F.U.C.T.,” she fretted that the group “didn’t spell ‘fucked’ right.”

These concerts aren’t alone in supplying memories for the ages — nearly every Sister Mary Rotten Crotch show provides an amusing anecdote. But such stories have been sparse lately because the group went on hiatus while Nord prepared to give birth to her second child, Charlie Cadence. Last week, the group made a low-key return to El Torreon’s stage under the unappetizing alias Brother John’s Festering Crotch. “It was kinda freaky because it had been so long,” Saunders says. “But I like playing under a different name because when you fuck up, it’s really not you.”

Understandable slip-ups aside (the group conceived a novel-sized book of new tunes while Nord was away; she still needed a lyric sheet for several), the pseudo-comeback show served as notice that Sister Mary was still tight. It also revealed that Nord, implausibly, has maintained her taut, mother-Madonna muscular physique.

“She’s perfectly back in shape,” Saunders confirms. “It’s gross and horrifying. Then I get asked, ‘Oh, are you the one that had the baby?’ ‘No, I’m just the fat chick. Thanks, though. I’ll remember this, asshole.'”

Perhaps Saunders could use such a case of mistaken identity as the lyrical basis for her as-yet-unwritten song “Fat Girls in Fishnets.” “I just thought up the phrase and thought it would make a great chorus,” she explains. “I’m all for fat chicks, so it’ll be a positive fat chicks song. How’s that? Fat chicks unite.”

Should this whimsical tune come into being, it should please Farrand, who Saunders fears is “miffed” about Sister Mary’s increasingly serious songs. Seeing only the group’s name, would-be listeners might have expected an arsenal of raunchy, funny songs, and Sister Mary initially complied with “I Don’t Love ‘Em” (I just fuck ’em is the punchline that follows that refrain) and “Pussy.” However, Nord and Saunders eventually shifted their focus to “serial killers, death, destruction and horribleness,” resulting in powerfully grim numbers such as “Polaroid” and “Senseless Crime.”

All four of the aforementioned tracks appear on Fuckload O’ Pretty, the group’s sixteen-song CD, which lingers in limbo after the apparent dissolution of its Wales-based record label Smokin’ Troll. Most of these songs follow Sister Mary’s early blueprint, which relies heavily on the verse-chorus-verse format (because of the band’s disinterest in bridges and breakdowns, its tunes feature many more verses than most songs of similar length) and mono-speed (almost always fast) drumbeats. However, its newer songs, many of which have yet to be performed in public, see the group stretching its boundaries.

“‘Consequence'” is very nerve-racking for me, because I play a lot of single-string stuff,” Saunders says, describing one of these fresh creations. “Real guitar players would laugh, but for me, it’s pretty adventurous. Our new stuff builds up more instead of smashing it right in your face the whole time. We have a bigger range now, but there’s no rap/metal, I swear to God.”

There’s also no rap/metal allowed at El Torreon anymore, a result of a local rip-hop outfit’s onstage temper tantrum, which included verbal abuse of a sound technician. Saunders documents this incident in Sister Mary’s “Rock Star,” a scathing indictment of self-absorbed musicians to which she might have to pen a sequel. The recent Vagrant America tour, which stopped at El Torreon on August 2 and featured bands on the opposite end of the aggression spectrum from rap/metal, infuriated El Torreon’s staff by disregarding its well-established rule that every concert must have a local opener.

“They said anybody who wasn’t on Vagrant couldn’t even play in the building,” Saunders recalls. “But we were practicing that night [inside El Torreon], so we played extra loud, just to be annoying.” That might not have been punishment enough, so “Rock Star (The Emo Version)” is now on the drawing board. Saunders proposes a breakdown in which “we’ll just stop playing and cry.”

If Sister Mary were a bit more emo-inclined, Nord might be hard at work on a tearjerker about the miracle of childbirth, the type of maudlin toddler-tribute that Will Smith, Stone Temple Pilots and Creed have parented in recent years. “She hasn’t busted out the touching ballad about being a mother yet,” Saunders says. “And there was a rule early in our inception that the day we did a ballad, I would walk. But if she can do a touching punk-rock song about being a parent, maybe. That would almost be funny to do.” Saunders pauses, then reconsiders. “I think we’ll just keep doing ‘Pussy.’ It’s probably safer.”