Grass Widow music has this strange feel to it, when the three Bay Area ladies let the screws loose and roll the stockings down a bit, that make you hear it as the soundtrack to the cat-and-mouse game that's played between graffiti artists and the police. You get the feeling that there's no bad guy there - each trying to employ the kind of cunning that would just allow them to do what they feel they must.
The police officers feeling like they need to protect the blank, canvas walls and sidewalks that the street artists covet for their strokes of beautiful social commentary and splashes of life where there was never suspected to be any. The artists feeling like they have such precious little time to get their ideas across - ideas that they can't bring themselves to stifle - and what better place to throw them against than the wall of a downtown restaurant?
Bassist Hannah Lew, guitarist Raven Mahon and drummer Lillian Maring (all singers) make what feels to be a renegade brand of alleyway punk rock that's full of life-blood, restaurant grease, scandalous but true hearts and only enough order to get by on. It's like we're all licking batteries and shoving forks into electrical sockets while we're listening to these loose rambles that could very well be chasing the splintered thoughts of three individual girls at the very same time. Typically, this means the same thing, but the thoughts diverge here and there and it gives us the feeling of a feather dropping three stories, from a bird overhead, or of an out-of-nowhere flash of lightning. It's as if at that very moment the street artist won, as the night rats scurry.