Five no-frills 1990s albums that define lo-fi

Pottymouth by Bratmobile (1993)

There’s an origin story about the movie The Usual Suspects that contends screenwriter Chris McQuarrie had the title before he had the story or the characters. He just thought it would be a cool title for a movie, so then he went ahead and wrote a movie to fit it. That’s kind of how Alison Wolfe and Molly Neuman formed one of the seminal riot grrrl bands, Bratmobile, in the early ‘90s. Neither knew how to play an instrument or write a song. They just thought Bratmobile would be a cool name for a band – and they wanted very much to be in a band.

They met as students at the University of Oregon and fell in love with the DIY spirit that was sprouting in the northwest. The journey toward actually becoming a band was aided in large part by one of the kings of lo-fi in the 1980s, Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening. Tired of hearing them talk the talk, he told them that they would be playing an upcoming party in support of the riot grrrl legends Bikini Kill. Alison and Molly quickly started writing some actual songs and practicing guitar.

From there, they travelled back to Molly’s hometown in Washington, DC, where punk legend Ian MacKaye took an interest in helping them develop. They added a couple of somewhat more accomplished musicians – Erin Smith and Christina Billotte – and finally considered themselves a real band. Billotte would soon drop out, due in part to the band’s ramshackle, amateurish approach to the business of being a band. So Bratmobile continued on as a trio.

The songwriting improved, as did the musicianship, but they never lost that pure, untrained energy that caught the attention of people like Johnson and MacKaye. By 1992, they had enough strong material to think about an actual album. Pottymouth consisted of 17 songs recorded both in Washington, DC and in Washington state. As Sara Marcus reports in her portrait of the riot grrrl scene, “Girls to the Front,” Nation of Ulysses guitarist Tim Green did the engineering in exchange for pizza and black hair dye.

Pottymouth may well be the definitive riot grrrl album. The songs mostly deal with what it is like to be a girl stuck in a world run by boys. They were commenting on both the music scene and the world at large. In “Stab,’ Wolfe sings over a driving series of power chords “You want to stab me, and f**k the wounds” over and over again like a mantra. They follow it up with a truly lo-fi cover of the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb.”

Later, they return to one of their earliest songs, the simply hypnotic drone of “Cool Schmool,” about the minefield of high school – sort of lo-fi version of the Waitresses “Square Pegs.” Though supremely simple, songs like “Queenie,” “Bitch Theme,” and “Throwaway” are undeniably clever earworms that aren’t all that different from what Green Day was doing at the same time.

Based on the strength of Pottymouth, Bratmobile got some acclaim, but the pressure of performing grew too much for some women who basically just wanted to be in a band for fun. They broke up within a year, though have had several reunions and re-formations over the last several decades.