"Everything is tried, and nothing's true," mutters Selene Vigil, her voice flitting above the guitar squall for an instant. The tune, "Miss Understood," is probably the closest thing to a pop song on Gato Negro, which leads me to believe that the people behind it must be either calculating their music for sheer infliction value, or they've been through serious enough shit to be irremediably miserable. After a few hours with the band, I know I'm only one for three. Calculated? Not really. Miserable? Hardly. Been through the shit? Absolutely.

"None of us wants to play wimpy music," says bassist Elizabeth, crammed into a red vinyl booth with the rest of the band at Hollywood's trashy, sorta-famous Formosa Cafe. "There's a lot [of] wussy music right now — wussy is big!"

Do not be fooled; there's more at work in Bitch music than simple wuss-avoidance. Sure, there ain't a single silly love song in this band's repertoire, and they often do cross the line into realms that are "not listener-friendly," as guitarist Roisin Dunne jokes. But anyone familiar with this band's history will not begrudge 7 Year Bitch their right to be absofuckinglutely pissed off (and about more substantive topics than the tortuous trapping of stardom, like certain other Seattle alternatypes-and I'm not talking about Kurt Cobain here). But then again, rage isn't everything.

"I think our songs are sad," says drummer Valerie Agnew.

"I was thinkin' about it," Selene says, sipping a scotch and water, "our stuff is kind of like love songs after all the love went bad. When you have these really intense feelings about people but it's like the back side of it. Not at all the happy times."

"The back side of luv!" drawls Valerie, chuckling. "Sounds like a porno movie....."

However you describe 7 Year Bitch's clatter, the press hasn't really pegged it. The New York Times calls the band "dirty, funky heavy metal," while the Los Angeles Times tags 'em "low-fi" and Rolling Stone opts for "riff-and bass driven punk rock." But the press has been lightning quick to jump on the "the Seattle thing," as Valerie calls it, not to mention the all-female thing, invariably leading to the riot grrrl thing, which 7 Year Bitch have been called "progenitors of...."

"What?" Selene stops me in mid-ramble. "Did you say, 'Janitors of the riot grrrl movement'?" Everyone at the table joins in a big, cathartic laugh.

"That riot grrrl thing showed up on a bunch of posters in Europe," explains Valerie, "they called us 'Godmothers of the Riot Grrrl Movement.'"

"It was in one of those dumb British magazines," steams Elizabeth. "You know, those two British National Enquirer music rags that're like interchangeable?"

"Riot grrrls — more power to 'em, let 'em do their thing," Valerie continues. "But we had absolutely nothing to do with it....."

"I just prefer to say that we've sucked too much cock to be riot grrrls," Elizabeth laughs.

If you're thick-skulled or humorless, you'll figure this means 7 Year Bitch aren't conscious of "women's issues." Never mind the band's inclusion on the Home Alive CD (a women's self-defense cooperative co-founded by Agnew), or the passion of tunes like "Dead Men Don't Rape," or just the fact that they're part of a contingent of women rockers challenging an overwhelmingly male style of music — not so much by eroding old barriers as crashing headlong through them. Perhaps they don't dish out riot grrrl proclamations a la Bikini Kill — they don't have to: sometimes the testeclad evidence of their sublte truths is moshing right there in front of them.

"I don't even like to hear people talking during certain songs, I feel so strongly about them," Elizabeth explains. "When I hear guys chanting for us to expose our breasts, it just fills me with disgust that in 1996 these young boys who are supposed to be a new kind of man are acting like this."

"And pretending to be so cool because they've all got piercings and are living this alternative lifestyle and are so against this and that," adds Valerie. "It's like, 'Fuck you. You're a bunch of fuckin' redneck morons.' Babes In Toyland opened for White Zombie in Seattle and they were getting booed. And we saw them play a great show regardless of what shit they were getting. That was really inspirational: rather than get into some kind of scuffle, you play harder and better and walk off knowing you did a kick-ass job and it's their loss if they don't get it."

"But you're only gonna notice the people who are assholes," Elizabeth notes, "because the people who aren't assholes aren't making a total spectacle of themselves."

"Yeah!" Selene says. "The cool guys need to make themselves known."

"We know you're out there!" says Valerie.

Gato Negro is exactly what you expect, and exactly what you want from 7 Year Bitch: harsh. Full of big, Sabbathy riffs, strong grooves and Selene's bitter shrieks and gnarled philosophy ("Everything I do irritates me..."), it's by a long shot the band's best. And while they certainly don't entirely dismiss their earlier recorded work, they admit to being a little, well, "tripped out" upon hearing it.

"It's weird," Selene says. "They were playing Viva Zapata the other night at the Crocodile and at first I was like 'God, this sounds familiar...oh, it's us!" she giggles. "I totally forgot it was even playing, and then somebody said, 'If anybody can do the monster mash I'll give 'em a free drink,' so I got up and did it. But in retrospect I'm like, 'Was I up on the bar dancing while our record was playing?' Oh my God!" Selene turns red. The waitress pops by, dropping off another white Russian for Elizabeth and another scotch and water for Selene (who says it helps her voice). The waitress is leaving in a half-hour and thinks we should tab out. "We'll be needing you again before then!" winks Elizabeth.

7 Year Bitch formed in 1990, none of them having any musical background. Six months later Valerie borrowed money from her mom to help finance their first single. What followed were six years of steady progress and steady victories leading to today's deal with Atlantic and the fulfillment of their early dream of having Love & Rockets comix artist Jaime Hernandez design the album cover.

But those years also handed the band a series of crushing personal setbacks, beginning with the overdose death of guitarist Stefanie Sargent in 1992. A year later, close friend and band mentor Mia Zapata (singer for the Seattle punk combo The Gits) was raped and murdered after leaving Seattle's Comet Tavern. This was followed the next year by the overdose death of Kristen Pfaff from Hole, and the suicide of Kurt Cobain, both friends of the band. The events, 7 Year Bitch agree, marked an absolute change in their direction, both musical and personal.

"Things were kind of fun-and-games when Stefanie was in the band," says Elizabeth. "We still wanna have a good time, but now we realize that this is really....tenuous. This whole life of being in a band is hanging by a fucking thread. When Mia died that was just galvanized all the more. In our personal lives we feel a permanent fear — it could have been any of us; we all walked away from the Comet that night, but it was Mia that got picked up."

"And things were at this apex at both of those times," Selene recalls sadly. "Right when Stefanie died we'd just gotten flown out to New York to do the New Music Seminar, which was a really big deal for us then. Our music was starting to come together, we were starting to sound like our own thing, and there was this real high. And she died."

"Just the other day, I was walking down the street, and I was really excited about this record and how we were sounding and suddenly I thought, 'Oh my God, I hope nobody dies.' I got really profoundly sad like, if somebody dies right now, this would be the fucking time for it to happen," she says, anger lacing her voice.

"Sometimes people are really tentative about asking us about this," admits Valerie. "We don't mind talking about it. But for a while every press article written about us was like, 'Oh, the poor little Bitch girls have been through so much trauma,' and I was starting to feel like we were a martyr band or something, and that everyone should like us and not give us a critical review because we've been through so much. Come on, we can handle it. We've been through fuckin' hell and back. It has motivated us to love what we're doing all the more and do it with that much more passion. And fuckin' just keep putting one foot in front of the other."

The waitress pops by again with egg rolls, fortune cookies and another round of drinks. "Y'see," Elizabeth smiles at her, "I told you we'd drink more before that half-hour was up."

"It's always been like bittersweet, bittersweet, bittersweet," Selene continues slowly. "Now, I just want it to be sweet for once."

"Lets segue away from this," says Elizabeth, cracking open a fortune cookie. "Let's see what our fortune is. Oh, look: 'You will soon be the guest of a royal host.'" It would be about time. And everybody laughs another big, cathartic laugh.

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