Roisin Dunne, Elizabeth Davis, Selene Vigil and Valerie Agnew
Even a quick, hurried listen to a cassette copy of the new Seven Year Bitch album reveals that one instrument has been allowed to dominate the bandwidth. It's the bass guitar, which rumbles like a fat-tired monster truck through the grooves of Gato Negro (Atlantic), Seven Year Bitch's third full-length album. Elizabeth Davis wields the rock-solid bass and her bandmates, Roisin Dunne (guitar), Selene Vigil (vocals) and Valerie Agnew (drums) take a confrontational tack with angry lyrics and attitudinal adjustments that make this group one of the baddest sounding bunch of femmes around. And it all starts with that Wall of Bass.
"I write the songs, so it's bass-oriented music," confesses Davis. "I want to make sure you can really feel it. You can make a bass sound so loud it'll move your bowels if it's low and loud enough. The bass has to cut through the other instruments, so that's why we have monstrously low and almost nauseating bass. Sometimes it can almost make you physically ill." The inescapable woofer-shredding impact of Black Sabbath and the bass of Geezer Butler are telltale influences when it comes to Davis.
"Geezer Butler's probably my favorite, but I didn't even listen to Black Sabbath until I was in my 20s, because I was scared of them when I was a kid. I grew up real religious and I wouldn't even go in my older brother's room if his Black Sabbath records were visible, because I thought they were truly Satanic. It's kind of funny now.
"I had a very conservative upbringing in a Christian boarding academy," she continues. "And I grew up loving music, but I always lived where there wasn't a music scene. I think my tastes developed more broadly because I didn't have peer pressure trying to make me like this or that. So at the same time I was really into Devo and the B52s, I was also into Ted Nugent."
Some of that explains the Seattle band's sound - kinda punk, kinda metal - a fast, furious estrogen-charged din. Davis is aware that an all-female band with such a hard and heavy sonic approach is bound to make the media concentrate on the fact that these four quite attractive and intelligent women make music that can peel the paint off a battleship.
"I think it's overly optimistic to think that people won't make that distinction anymore," Davis opines. "I've noticed that things are getting better, that people are remarking more on the music and lyrics than clothes or gender issues. When we first started doing press, it was all 'riot grrrl this and riot grrrl that' and we never had anything to do with that."
True, though the riot grrrl movement was also birthed in Washington state (Olympia to be exact) and shared an anger-coated, it's-my-turn-now sentiment, bands like Bikini Kill make music that's much different from Seven Year Bitch.
"Yeah," Davis agrees, "but it became an instantly identifiable cliché that the media jumped on. You know, that instant, makes-its-own-sauce type of journalism. 'Riot grrrl' just became a huge catch phrase and we got lumped in with it. It's very inaccurate and frustrating."
Frustration is one thing that pumps the bellows and feeds the fire of some of the anger suffusing the music like a dry, stifling heat. That and hard times, as Seven Year Bitch has dealt with its share of tragedy. The band's original guitarist, Stefanie Sargent, died of an overdose in 1992, and their friend Mia Zapata of the Seattle group the Gits was raped and murdered that year. The killer's still at large, but Seven Year Bitch made quite a statement with their subsequent song "Dead Men Don't Rape" on their Viva Zapata! disc from 1993.
So these women have reasons for their rage. And Davis doesn't see that as unusual at all, under the circumstances.
"I think most bands are angry," she notes, "unless they're Bobby McFerrin or somebody. Anger is a very immediate emotion. Happy music is just too personal sometimes."
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