Moxie Music

Moxie, a Radiohead-worshipping post-punk quartet, has recently started experimenting with keyboards and drum machines. Its staunchly sociopolitical lyrics betray both higher education and party-weary awareness; its classically trained, jazz-informed bassist/pianist concocts complex countermelodies, and its drummer speaks only in arena-sized exclamation points. Basically, it’s the type of overqualified bar band with which music snobs would instantly become infatuated, except for one thing: All Moxie’s members are female, a fact that distinguishes it from other local acts to a much greater degree than singer Christy Pucci would prefer.

“The fact that we’re girls seems to be really important to everyone but us,” protests the exasperated vocalist, who met bassist Lacey Ellington and guitarist Megan Kasten while studying classical music and opera at William Jewell College. “While being female might initially set us apart from the crowd, it’s mostly just another obstacle to overcome. You have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. I’m sick of being taken as a fucking novelty. It seems so hard for people to believe that we actually play good music and we’re girls. When I was growing up, I wanted to emulate Mick Jagger, not Courtney Love.”

Indeed, Pucci’s swaggering stage presence directly recalls Jagger’s moves without a hint of Love’s coy peep-show exhibitionism. (The coordination of her choreography, if not its content, probably owes something to Pucci’s seven years of ballet training.) In stark contrast with Pucci’s charmed-snake squiggles, the rest of Moxie’s members exude a chilly professional vibe, clenched in concentration during instrumental intervals and switching instruments without any fall-off. It’s the sort of technically precise presentation groups such as Namelessnumberheadman and the Daybirds are known for, though Moxie won’t get many chances to share bills with these outfits as long as there are other “girl bands” on the circuit.

“It’s frustrating being booked with bands that you musically have little or nothing in common with simply because we all have tits,” Pucci says.

At least one Moxie member welcomed such gender-based booking earlier in her career, when it resulted in an opportunity to share a bill with Kathleen Hanna, who first inspired Kasten to pick up a guitar. Kasten fronted Red Letter, the aggressively shrill outfit that opened for Hanna’s danceable revolution Le Tigre at the Bottleneck in September 2000. Before that, Kasten embraced girliness even more openly by choosing a name (Cat Fight) that music fans would instantly associate with a female-fronted band. As the primary songwriter in both projects, Kasten addressed sexism and body politics in the riot-grrrl tradition. However, now that she’s outgrown both rudimentary riffs and issue-specific sets, Kasten tires of being ghettoized on female-only bills. The success of metal heavyweights Kittie notwithstanding, upstart estrogen-powered ensembles still encounter the attitude immortalized in an unbelievably patronizing Jim Beam ad. “Sometimes you pay $12 to hear bad music,” reads the copy hovering above the vacant heads of several leering, fist-pumping drunks toasting three women rocking out on stage. “Sometimes bad music is worth $12.”

“I always hear people say ‘They’re actually good,’ as if the general rule is female musicians are poor musicians,” says Kasten, a versatile instrumentalist equally adept at bass, guitar, piano and, though Moxie hasn’t yet called for it, oboe.

“We are often subject to condescension because of our vaginas,” agrees Ellington, who played piano on Higher Burning Fire‘s amazing 2001 album and added keys to a Coalesce record and other Red House productions.

At the moment, Moxie has bigger worries than boorish bookers and cackling crowds. Having already taking a forced hiatus while Kasten studied abroad in Vienna, Moxie finds itself needing to fill another void. Ellington, a vet-in-training, leaves soon to study exotic animals in Australia — “She’ll be charting the mating rituals of duck-billed platypi or something equally fascinating,” Pucci quips — and the group hasn’t had much luck finding anyone capable of replicating her distinctively difficult bass lines, let alone her enthusiastic onstage banter. Similar rhythm-section departures led Frogpond and Sister Mary Rotten Crotch, two of the area’s most distinguished once-all-female groups, to diversify their attacks, and none of Moxie’s members has any qualms about going coed.

“It seems as if all the good ones are already in a band and don’t have time for another,” Pucci explains. “Plus, it’s hard to find someone who will dedicate themselves when they know it’s only going to be for four months.” (If you’re a bassist who doesn’t mind such a situation, contact Moxie at moxierocks@hotmail.com.) “I personally wouldn’t mind having boys in the band. I didn’t choose my bandmates because they were girls. I wanted to play with them because they were really talented and we have a ton of fun working together.”

For Moxie’s gig at The Brick on Thursday, July 25, the Gadjits‘ Zach Phillips will man the bass position. Like Phillips’ meal-ticket group, Moxie has drastically altered its sound over the past few years. While the group started with straightforward punk progressions and cathartic choruses, its most recent songs incorporate a programmed beat, squealing dual guitars (drummer Rachel Meyers grabs an ax after the machine takes over stick duty) and percolating bass lines while Pucci shakes wordlessly to the chaos. Although this formation seems to offer a possible solution — move Meyers to guitar and Kasten to bass, then let the mechanical metronome thump — Moxie’s members balk at eliminating the organic backbeat.

The tunes bridging these extremes revel in feedback-clouded melodies, stretching out during the verses before sprinting through the hooks. These creations carry titles such as “My Little Pony,” though the names, proposed by Meyers and usually recited onstage by Ellington, have little if anything to do with Pucci’s stark lyrical content. That’s probably a plus; better that cutesy-craving fans equate Moxie’s songs with petite equestrians than drug-addled teens and power-blinded puppets.

“It’s probably a good thing people can’t understand most of the words I sing,” Pucci says. “They’d never believe how many references to sex and drugs there are.”

Such statements probably don’t fit most fans’ images of a fashionable female band, one whose most prominent members don skirts instead of opting for tomboyish camouflage. But for Moxie, that’s all the better.

“Fuck people’s expectations of how we should look or sound,” Pucci vents. “We’re not going to try to fulfill some image or preconceived notion of what girl bands should be like just because it might make us more marketable or well-liked.”

“I’m happily waiting for the day when there are just as many female bands as there are male bands, and female bands are the norm,” Kasten adds. “But I also think it attracts people to find that we are all girls and we can rock.”