When an all-woman rock band sets up camp in the traditional rock 'n' roll boys' club, it's almost impossible to ignore the restrictive political status thrust automatically upon the band. Unless that band is Bella, a latter-day riot-grrrl trio from Mesa that doesn't allow stereotypical dogma to strangle their creative impulse.
Susan Jordan
"You're just a little boy": Bella stuffs it in your face.
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"I have a huge problem writing something with any hint of politics or opinion. I'm such a neutral character," says front woman Natalie Espinosa. "Bands like Sleater-Kinney have a great way of slipping in messages, and that's great, but when I try to do it . . . it just doesn't come out right."
And that's a good thing. Political art is easy. Most people know -- or should know -- that war can hurt, that child abuse is wrong and discriminating against someone because of their gender is ugly. Creating something emotional and personal is much more difficult -- "subtlety is the providence of genius," poet and doctor Scott Edward Topper once wrote.
This, of course, doesn't mean Bella's symbolic platform eclipses their ability to play -- if anything, there's a tangible sense of pride and appreciation on the faces of female fans when Bella punches through one of its vigorous old-school-punk-inspired sets. A July 31 show at Modified Arts, for instance, saw Bella share a diverse bill with intense, quirky Northwestern sex rockers the Gossip and fellow locals Second Hand Emotion -- for a not-so-diverse crowd. Second Hand Emotion, obvious beginners, opened with a sloppy set and an attitude of contrived disaffection. Support for even that band was unanimous, though, and its pseudo-Valley Girl pose was bolstered by applause.
So even if Bella had self-destructed onstage that night, the same supportive audience would have lifted them up again without disdain. But Bella did not collapse. The band thrived on the crowd's sympathetic revelry and rocked through a brief but powerful set, earning every bit of the audience's adoration. "Girl power" wasn't necessarily the message emanating from the stage, but Bella's rock 'n' roll energy ignited a crowd of pogo-ing women whose admiration for the band wasn't nearly as subtle.
Bassist Kristi Wimmer suggests that their perceived flag-bearing nature is unavoidable. "Natalie's lyrics and our songs aren't about feminism or girl power, but what we're doing is," Wimmer says. "We can all be professionals, teachers and mothers and still rock out with the best of them."
That's not hyperbole -- the members are a professional, a teacher and a mom, respectively. Espinosa, guitarist and singer for the band, recently earned her master's in marketing from Northern Arizona University and will begin teaching high school business classes. Wimmer possesses a master's degree of her own; hers is in criminal justice. She works at Arizona State and also teaches a GED class to ex-cons. Drummer Jency Rogers is a mother of two and works in a local skate shop (she's trying to get a skate company to sponsor her as a musician so she can get the free shoes. Hey, you'd try it too.). The women are articulate, successful and can definitely rock out, too.
That they're an excellent three-piece overshadows the initial questions their gender may raise for simple-minded naysayers. Brianne Grimmer, guitarist, singer and lone female member for local power-pop quintet Fifteen Minutes Fast, says she's had several bemused conversations with Natalie about, as Brianne puts it, the "novelty" of an enthralling all-female band -- this city, after all, isn't Olympia, Washington, where Le Tigres and the Bangs and the next-generation would-be Sleater-Kinneys fall out of trees like acorns. "I think that if people decide to go see Bella because they are like, Oh, it's an all-girl band. We're gonna go check them out,' they're going to go see them and say, They're really good,'" Grimmer says.
Okay, so we finally move past the gender issues, and we discover something that in a way makes Bella stand out even more in the Phoenix scene. There isn't a sarcastic, deprived, drunk-at-1:30-a.m.-on-a-Tuesday chord in their repertoire. They're a throwback to a simpler era of rock when smarmy smart-ass antics weren't the norm. Espinosa leaves no doubt when she hits the stage that irony has no mantle in her m.o. She really is that sincere and intense.
"I think I've always been a rocker at heart," says Espinosa. "So growing up I liked stuff like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. I never branched out to New Wave stuff like Depeche Mode. I went from AC/DC to Guns n' Roses and Mötley Crüe." Sleater-Kinney, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a divided nod to hip-hop -- Wimmer isn't as keen on the b-boy set as her bandmates -- fill out the band's current influences.
Bella's earnestness is refreshing, and it's a different type of earnestness than, say, that of local heroes Jimmy Eat World. Both bands use pop's crunchy, uncomplicated phrasing, but Bella's music avoids the trite cheering you find on JEW's hit "The Middle," in which a friend is encouraged with the line "Everything's gonna be all right, all right." Where JEW is a pop pep talk, Bella embraces true-to-life sadness without trivializing it.
