“So we’re 7 Year Bitch. These are our songs. Hope you like ‘em.”
That’s it as far as intros go, before one of the heaviest Seattle bands of the nineties thunders into action on Live at Moe’s, a concert album recorded at the Capitol Hill venue that metamorphosed into Neumos.
This live release comes courtesy of MOE Recordings, a new indie label started by iMusic head honcho Scott Blum. Blum found the 7 Year Bitch live recording in a box in his basement, collecting dust among 350 other master recordings. The label plans to issue other bands’ live sets from that cache of tapes in the future, and if this potent flagship release is any indication, we’re in for an amazing sonic storehouse.
The record captures 7 Year Bitch in 1996, at a time when the world was just beginning to come down from the lather it had worked itself into over the Seattle music scene. A few Northwest bands, however—even some loud and sonically-challenging ones—were still able to catch a lift from the cultural jet stream of post-Nirvana media attention. 7 Year Bitch was one of those acts. They’d earned a devoted local following with two albums’ worth of gut-level, feminist punk on legendary indie label C/Z Records, and big-leaguer Atlantic had just put out Gato Negro, the record that wound up being 7 Year Bitch’s first and only major label release. Listening to Gato Negro now—with its alternately churning and racing riffs, neck-snapping time changes, and gloriously caterwauling vocals—it’s nothing short of a welcome cosmic anomaly that a major label released it at all.
Live at Moe’s provides a representative example of the true Seattle grunge sound—not the mellifluously-yarled flannel-clad arena rock that won the hearts of the masses, but the mutant gene-splice of Stooges proto-punk and Sabbath-level metal riffage that spurred Mark Arm (or whoever uttered it first) to coin the term in the first place. This is a find from a nostalgic time in the region’s musical history that’s about as far from warm-and-fuzzy nostalgia as you can get.
The 12-song set democratically splits the difference between Gato Negro tracks and selections from the band’s high point, 1994’s Viva Zapata!, with one song from their 1992 debut full-length Sick ‘Em (a sneering take on “Lorna”) rounding things out. Raw power provides the one common thread, and it’s displayed in abundance throughout Live at Moe’s. “24,900 Miles per Hour” opens the record with textbook force, as Roisin Dunne’s flanged shotgun blast of a guitar explodes atop Valerie Agnew’s forceful drums and Elizabeth Davis-Simpson’s meaty bass. From there, the intensity never lets up. “Miss Understood” mashes the Hell out of its circular guitar riff while vocalist Selene Vigil-Wilk bellows out the sorta-chorus of “Sometimes I feel misunderstood” with a gale-force gust light-years removed from any navel-gazing. And Agnew’s battering of her kit on “Rock a Bye” couldn’t sound more like a fist repeatedly hitting a ribcage.
Like any effective punk singer worth his or her extended middle finger, Vigil-Wilk could give a rat’s ass less about being conventionally melodic. But the rhythmic forcefulness of her howling, chanted, hollered delivery lent a hip-hop MC’s percussiveness to a lot of the songs. And her words remain riveting, whether she’s bluntly assessing an ex’s smack habit on “Hip Like Junk” or yowling out her sense of anger and loss over the murder of close friend Mia Zapata on “M.I.A.”
7 Year Bitch conducted an interview at the EMP with Senior Curator Jacob McMurray on January 17 to celebrate the release of ‘Live at Moe.’ (photo: Tony Kay)
One of the unexpected joys of Live at Moe’s is re-discovering how 7 Year Bitch tweaked the monochromatic sludginess of grunge to their own ends. “Deep in the Heart” sounds like the lethal younger sister of The Stooges’ “Dirt,” with Davis-Simpson’s bass swinging almost funkily and Roisin Dunne’s pinging dirty blues notes swelling to sledgehammer pummeling. And on “The Stretch,” Dunne bashes out a concise guitar riff straight out of a summit meeting between The Sonics and early Soundgarden.
Hearing those sonic detours in a live recording twenty years later can’t help but make you wish 7 Year Bitch coulda stuck it out for another record or two (the band split up just a year after this show was recorded). But the overriding feeling generated by Live at Moe’s is one of exhilaration—the sound of an ass-kicking rock band going into that good night very damned loudly.
