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Wanted women
By William Crook
wcrook@mscd.edu

Photo by Chuck Iversen • civerse1@mscd.edu Call the sheriff, round up the posse: My Sister Outlaw is still at large. From left: Sophia Throop, Jocelyn Holst, Andrea Allen and Suzi Allegra.

Long gone are the days of the Lilith Fair, when long-haired, deep and complex singer/songwriters would mourn the loss of their dead kittens. Equally gone are the short-haired Riot Grrrls in combat boots, smashing patriarchy from the comfort of the stage. For a time, these were the voices of women in music. Today the voices come from life-sized Barbie dolls singing about mistakenly doing things again and the various uses for the junk in their trunk.

Thankfully, My Sister Outlaw is here to pull female musicianship out of the well of oblivion into which it has fallen.

Listening to the music, the vocals stand out first, like skyscrapers. Melodic and sonorous, they push against a wind of well-orchestrated harmonies set atop a solid foundation of rock guitars and drums. The inclusion of keyboards and such unlikely instruments as flutes and didgeridoo add an edge to their musical mix.

Drawing from influences as diverse as cult icons Love and PJ Harvey to perennial favorites the Beatles, their sound is hard to define as straight-up rock and even harder to describe as anything else.

“I would say we are ’60s-influenced rock-pop-psychedelic with a lot of girl harmonies,” guitarist Andrea Allen said.

The group creates this sound democratically.

“It’s not anybody’s band specifically. We’re all equals and we all contribute equal amounts, and I’ve been in other bands and that never happens,” guitarist/vocalist Jocelyn Holst said.

“I know that no matter what, when I play … I totally feel accepted and comfortable and ... can put my input in,” drummer Sophia Throop said.

As an all-female rock band, My Sister Outlaw is a rare breed in the Denver music scene. That situation has its drawbacks.

“There’s not as many women in music in Denver, and we usually end up playing with weird bands that aren’t usually the best fit with us,” bassist Suzi Allegra said.

“If we’re not performing the best, people assume that’s because we’re girls,” Allegra said. “I feel like there’s a higher expectation that we should totally rock, and that we have to prove ourselves.”

Being judged on appearances is another obstacle.

“Instead of people saying things like ‘Your music was good,’ people say, ‘Your band was hot.’ So it’s less sometimes about the music and more about how we look, because we’re females,” Throop said.

Of course, being a relative curiosity also has its advantages.

“We definitely end up playing way more shows with guy bands, and that’s always fun because people are always into a girl band,” Allen said. “I think that we can use (the fact that we are women) to our advantage. Say we’re just playing at this bar, I think the chances would be higher that (people at the bar) would come over and watch us in the beginning just because we are girls, and then a lot of times people end up loving us.”

Sadly, those advantages don’t extend to one of the favorite benefits of many bands: attracting comely audience members. In this area, the sexual dichotomy of the music industry is always obvious to the members of My Sister Outlaw.

“I don’t feel like we ever get the hot guys, it’s always the really drunk loser guys,” Allen said. “Not like I’m looking for hot guys, but we don’t really get the hot ones.”

Listen to My Sister Outlaw at http://www.myspace.com/mysisteroutlaw, or watch the video for “Someone Else’s Song” at http://www.cinemadetour.com.