Odd Girl Out feature

Here’s a link to the final Baltimore City Paper version, while my original draft appears below:

“I feel like the name of the band, right from the get-go you know it’s a girl band,” Odd Girl Out lead guitarist Kristen Brzowsky suggests thoughtfully.

“We’re girls and we always play, nine times out of ten, with guy bands – so we’re always outsiders,” singer Mary “Tawni” Tawney reasons.

“We’re all part of the gay community, so automatically, we’re on the outside,” guitarist Eva Blackmer offers.

“Bethany [Petr] came up with it. Bethany comes up with everything!” Tawney interjects, then adds sardonically: “My friend Ethan calls the band ‘Eat Girl Out’!”

The five members of Odd Girl Out – clustered around Petr’s cell phone at the band’s Silver Spring practice space for an interview in late June – then burst into simultaneous, uproareous laughter. They’re mulling over the many possible connotations their name carries, but, as with every other response, this one dissolves from direct answers into zings and good-natured ribbing so infectious that even a reporter feels almost in on the jokes. Considering the obstacles Odd Girl Out overcame to arrive at the self-release of adrenilized debut Hurry Up and Wait, the loose, playful mood is both understandable and ironic: understandable because the album took some 30 months to complete as various musicians joined and left – roughly a month for each punk-rockin’ minute – ironic because while such impediments routinely scuttle promising acts before they can make a mark, OGO’s travails have strengthened it.

“The lows have been all the times when past members indicated they didn't share the sort of interest and investment in the band that I have,” says drummer and unofficial publicist Petr. “I give this entity everything. It's really personal for me, so it's been sad and disappointing when we had members who didn't really care about it the same way.”

Tawney is more blunt. “Basically, we had crazy bitches in the band that we had to throw out before we could finish the record,” she quips. “Now we have crazy bitches that we like.”

Odd Girl Out was born in late 2004, when Petr, Tawney, and a few others broke away from a blues/swing covers band to form a different breed of covers outfit – one that specialized in pop-punk and rock songs recorded by female artists. Among their early performance staples were songs by the Bangles, the Killers, Jill Sobule, and Hole. Until, that is, Petr tried her hand at songwriting for the first time and discovered a knack for it.

“The first song I wrote was about how crappy and annoying the band we had left was,” she remembers. “We later revamped it, and it’s now our song ‘Lost in Translation’ – no longer about that other band. It's not the first one we worked up – that was ‘5 Years.’”

The tunes – which, in Odd Girl Out’s hands, eventually became thunderous potential hits that owe as much to 80s rocker Joan Jett as they do to 90s riot-grrls Bikini Kill – kept coming, but personnel havoc hindered their wider dissemination beyond sets at various Baltimore, Northern Virginia, and Washington, D.C. venues. The keyboardist/rhythm guitarist and the bassist – still moonlighting with the swing/blues group – eventually quit due to a combination of scheduling conflicts and lack of avidity for the material; an “erratic and insane” lead guitarist lasted a year, only to be followed by another who bolted after only a few weeks. At different intervals, batteries of auditions brought new recruits into the fold: Blackmer to handle rhythm guitar (though she’d later switch to bass), Brzowsky on lead guitar, and Blackmer’s friend Selena Benally to chip in an additional ax. As the turmoil raged, the band was nonetheless playing out and laying down tracks for Wait at Baltimore’s Wrightway Studios. The turnovers – and the difficulties faced in trying to find compatible players in between – meant that new members had to learn the songs and re-record guitar and bass parts, further delaying the record’s completion.

“It’s harder for us because there aren’t a lot of female musicians that are into what we do – they’re too old or two young or into folk,” explains Tawney, who sweetly dodges the question of OGO’s ages by giving the band’s averaged age as 24. “People don’t understand what it takes to be in a band. They think we don’t practice or play very much, and that’s not us.”

Given the uncertainty surrounding its genesis, Wait is a surprisingly composed, coiled, and concise initial salvo. Lyrically, Petr’s protagonists are women whom, when faced with dangerous, difficult, or just plain frustrating traps they can’t avoid, respond by re-framing the dramas as something easily controllable, coolly dissecting what’s happening and laying out all the evidence. Tawney’s belting, boisterously passionate delivery obliterates any sense of tedious calculation that description might imply, carried along by the sort of off-the-cuff, three-chord strikes and walloping drums that recall Letters to Cleo and a pair of underrated, femme-fronted 90s punk bands: little-known NYC trio Fur and Oakland’s fiery, uncompromising Tilt. In the crunchy “Picture,” with its pointed-yet-diplomatic, anthemic chorus – “Sing me a song about the depths of your disappointment/Paint me a picture of your pain” – what could become a lover’s quarrell is forestalled in an invitation to talk things out instead of going nuclear. For the narrator of “MySpace,” though, the fun’s over; the song, which teases with faux-Extreme, prom-dance scaling before thickening into a catchy, lumbering behemoth, is a bullet-point ‘Dear Jane’ letter-list: “Do you recall a time I lived up to your expectations?/Do you recall a single joke without my defamation?” At times, Wait resembles a kick-ass empowerment seminar – or the ideal CD to blast en route to a girl’s night out.

The peppily high-octane “5 Years,” meanwhile, wouldn’t have been out of place on the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack – perfect for those scenes where Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles engage in madcap paintball warfare, as it’s a rowdy, celebratory buildup to a romantic spark between people whose love seemed unimaginable. The song also works, unintentionally, as a metaphor for OGO itself: liner-note shots suggest a group of vastly dissimilar women thrown together, a last-ones-picked-for-teams quintet lacking a unifying mindset or fashion aesthetic – goth, grrl, glam, and granola. Indeed, members are so scattered – geographically, vocationally, and in terms of musical influences – that their dedication to OGO appears all the more incredible.

Soft-spoken, San Diego-born Benally is a full-time student at the University of Southern Maryland and a Metallica fan. Petr digs Green Day and teaches computer programming at the Columbia high school she attended. Tawney, who grew up in Baltimore but today resides in Cockeysville, is a nanny, a co-owner of SHE Productions, and partial to Madonna and Queen. Blackmer grew up in St. Mary’s County on a steady diet of “angry girl music” like Hole and Bikini Kill; she calls Greenbelt home and works at the Maryland Center for Environmental Training. Baltimore County native Brzowsky somehow juggles a job as a “professional flapjack flipper,” two bands (OGO and Celia Kipp & the Last Ditch), DJ gigs, and a love of NOFX, Fat Wreck Chords, and the Smashing Pumpkins. Sexual orientation’s a nominal uniting force – Baltimore Pride served as Wait’s unofficial release party, and sold well there – but a shared love for their sound, mutual admiration, and friendship seem to be the ties that bind OGO together as they begin their preliminary search for a record deal. Tawney uses an anatomical metaphor to explain the band’s dynamic: “Bethany is the mind, I am the mouth, and Kristen, Eva, and Selena are very vital organs.”

“They take something I write with my sort of meager guitar/bass skills and turn it into something totally awesome,” Petr gushes.

Odd Girl Out play the Charm City Rollergirls Bout at Skateland on July 15. For more information, visit http://www.oddgirlout.net/.

Also: my new Singles Going Steady piece, Christy & Emily "Noah," and a Benni Hemm Hemm live preview.