Magneta Lane Issue #24

The sound of this Toronto garage-rock trio is sort of like Courtney Love-meets-the-Strokes

By Daphne Carr
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 2:06pm

Broody, big, guitary garage rock with smoldering, growl vocals crooning madly over tense rhythms — this is what Magneta Lane does. No excess, no waste, just heavy, snaggle-toothed bass lines bouncing occasionally new wave, drop-dime punk changes, infectious choruses.

Their sound is perfect pop rock for a world where the perfect band can be all-girl without being “a girl band.” This is how they want it. A trio from Toronto, Ontario, they have more in sonic common with the Pacific Northwest ’90s grrl scene than their stated affinity for Courtney Love would let you believe.

Like Love, lead singer-guitarist Lexi Valentine said she is not a feminist, but her politic is less angry response to ex-girlfriends and scensterism and more squarely post-third wave. In short, Magneta Lane rocks apolitick off the backs of their biggest idols — Veruca Salt, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Hole — with sonic nods but stated disavowal. I asked gingerly, “Why does your press release say, ‘moody but not moany, feminine but not feminist — confident but by no means arrogant’?” Valentine said, “We don’t want boundaries, and don’t have agendas in our songs. We want our songs to be for everyone.”

Valentine and drummer Nadia King are cousins who loved going to shows together. The legend is of their going to see the Libertines and wanting a better view: on stage. “It wasn’t that show, really, but just in general I thought, ‘What’s the point of just being in the audience?” Valentine said. Like any great garage band, they forced their friend, French, to pick up the bass overnight.

“This is my first band and probably my last one,” said Valentine, who lives, with King, at her parents’ house. French goes to school part time, and all three want desperately for Magneta Lane to be the band of their lives. They practice twice a week for four hours in a practice space shared by fellow Toronto band Controller.Controller. Magneta Lane was signed to Paper Bag Records after only four shows. Their EP was released in Canada last summer, and a full-length is being recorded this summer, with Jesse Keeler of Death From Above 1979.

The online envy and disdain for Magneta Lane is palpable, where one taunting critic was even fired from a site for the vitriol he unleashed on the band. Valentine said that the rage crosses over to their live shows. “When we played in Vancouver, this girl got onstage with us and started making out with her boyfriend, and then she started putting her hand up my skirt. I thought she was going to kick my pedals off, and I just kept trying to move away. Earlier she’d come backstage and said, ‘My band has been trying to get signed for 10 years, and we’re here to see what you could do.’”

What they do is make memorable garage rock that only promises future greatness. Valentine’s formerly high voice has finally settled to the lower registers, like a slinky oboe with full vibrato. Her lyrics tell stories of other girls and freely but unconsciously quote from her favorite songwriters — from Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” on “Medusa” and from Iggy Pop’s “Candy” on “Ugly Socialite” — and ride strong over her overdubbed lead lines and flooding distorted chords.

Magneta Lane’s “The Constant Lover” is the essence of a great song. After an infectious three-note guitar and drum intro — a verse, a bridge, a chorus. Each bit is a brilliant hook, driving desire for the second repetition. A dark middle eight suggests the girl subject’s powers of repeated seduction, building small chaos back to the first verse, re-introducing Valentine’s first verse report of the unhitched lover. She tells it first as narration, then in second-person, giving advice, then assuming the voice of the girl. Listen closely, though. The second verse has this one line: “While he’s playing his guitar, she knows that someday he’ll get far / ‘Girl, keep your beauty, they say that’s your duty.’” For the second line, her voice drops in character.

It is this voice that I was listening for in Magneta Lane, as a Venus writer, but the same voice that I heard in Courtney 14 years ago, when her characters, her ever-shifting voices, dared buck the underground, wanting big time, not content to “do it for the kids, yeah.” The wish fulfillment here is this — Valentine, French, and King were kids, 9 or 10 years old, when Love sang those lines. And we, crossing fingers for Francis Bean, are offered these new sonic children of Love as ruminations on an alternate story of growing up girl in the 1990s.