Mary Beats Jane
(Geffen)
by Scott Hefflon
If you were wondering where that classic grinding metal of early Metallica went, well, it just came back, reincarnated in a band called Mary Beats Jane. Before Hetfield and the boys began writing brooding masterpieces and filming arty black and white videos, they wrote skull-crushing tunes filled with roaring and intelligent vocals, non-stop guitar crunching and riffing, and drumming that plodded like an elephant or raced like a pissed-off suburban rebel in a souped-up Chevelle. Mary Beats Jane returns to that pure source without all the trimmings of post-metal artiness. These guys play power chords. Vocalist Peter Dolving screams his voice raw on topics such as relationships, sex, politics, and revolution, without being too much of a punk poet or self-proclaimed voice of a generation.
The ever-quotable Dolving explains, “Intensity is a state of mind. It’s not a thing you choose. It’s there or it’s not. I’d rather scream my lungs out than kill myself. Suicide? Waste of time. It won’t make you happy, it’ll just make you dead. It’s more of a challenge to take the pain and turn it into something else.” I like this guy; he doesn’t preach, he just speaks his mind.
The rather stick-in-your-head band name that they’ve chosen originated as an inside joke. Guitarist Urban’s girlfriend Mary and then-bassist Tommy’s girlfriend Jane would all-too-often get rip-roaring drunk and beat the crap out of each other at parties and clubs. Whenever somebody “asked” the trite and traditional greeting, “What’s going on?” the snappy-answers-to-stupid-questions response became, “Well, Mary beats Jane.”
Since then, things have gotten crazy, as often happens in the soap opera lifestyle of rock ‘n’ roll. The band’s demo brought them cult sensation status, Tommy left Jane, Urban left Mary, Tommy left the band, they recorded their self-titled for Geffen with bassist Jonaz Lindgren, Lindgren was replaced by Bjarne Olsson (gee, any relation to guitarist Urban Olsson?), they toured extensively in Europe and are now being introduced in the U.S.
Not to be misconstrued as any kind of retro metal movement or a bunch of dorks who just can’t fathom that the ’80s are over, Mary Beats Jane are either a mid-’90s band or just timeless heavy music. They’ve got a flash or two of Alice in Chains harmonies, some Nirvana-esque minimalism, and one mean strut tune aptly titled, “Grind.” For the most part, this is foot-to-the-floor driving music, and everyone had best get the fuck out of the way if they know what’s good for them.
