If This Rock Star Thing Fails, There's Always Law School
by Kevin Bronson
She’s studious enough to get accepted to law school at age 20, savvy enough to steer an obscure pop group briefly into the limelight and smart enough to pen lyrics that affect critics and fans alike.
But when Elizabeth Elmore’s band, Sarge, broke up in 1999, devoured by its own ravenous personalities, she reacted like the small-town Midwestern girl she is. "I got all melodramatic and angst-ridden," she said recently. "I was 23. The band was my life, my family. I was horrified."
Just over two lears later, with Northwestern Law School again on hold, Elmore has regrouped. The self-titled debut album from her new Chicago-based quartet, the Reputation, is due in two weeks from the indie label Initial Recrods, and the band plays three shows in the Southland this week, starting Sunday night at Chain Reaction in Anaheim.
"I’m feeling much better now," Elmore joked on the eve of a three-week, do-it-herself tour of the West, but anybody who scrutinizes her latest work might wonder.
In her new material, Elmore professes to be spurned, burned, cast out, reviled and simply benumbed by recurring relationship wars. Amid punky guitar bursts and simple melodies, she purges, asserting her independence, pricking mindless partyers and straddling the line between spiteful and contrite in "The Uselessness of Friends."
Any residual vitriol points to her experience with Sarge, which seemed poised to emerge from the indie masses after its second album, "The Glass Intact" (1998). By year’s end Rolling Stone and Spin christened Sarge a "hot band," acclaim for which Elmore was not ready.
She recalls playing a coffeehouse in Gulfport, Miss., in 100 degree temperatures. "In front of 15 kids," she said. That night she learned via e-mail of a glowing review in Spin, "and I just kind of shut down. I couldn’t quite accept that what we were doing was worth all the attention.”"
As the band soldiered on into 1999, neither could her friends in indie circles. "I got vilified behind my back," Elmore said. "‘ Why the hell was she in Rolling Stone?’ ‘ What did she do?’ I got lucky. I know I got lucky. Yes, I know a lot of it was because I was a girl. But people thought my band was so much bigger than it was."
It took a certain self-possession to survive - after all, she was conducting most of Sarge’s business (she booked the entire Reputation tour, and did some of her own promotional work), as well as juggling other responsibilities.
Said Reputation guitarist Sean Hulet, who know Elmore then: "How many people can say they’re going to law school, playing in a touring rock band and trying to work too? Oh, and she likes to have fun."
"Elizabeth is very tenacious, and it’s one of those traits that can drive you crazy until you get to know her."
A demure Elmore might not have made it out of her one-stoplight hometown of Rochester, Ill., let alone bounced back from her band’s demise. But after a year and a half of hitting the law books, she dipped her toe in the icy waters of solo touring before hooking up with Hulet, bassist Joel Root and a rotating cast of drummers.
The Reputation’s pop/punk novellas, told through Elmore’s jaded choirgirl vocals, are more policshed than the songs that earned Sarge its press in ’98. Whether the Reputation can distinguish itself, Hulet says, might depend on how the band gets pigeonholed.
"We tour with the punk and indie set," he said, "but we’re not angular and fashionable enough to be an indie band and we’re not hard-core enough to be a punk band."
So they are a pop band with an attitude - Elmore’s.
"I’m sure that when I’m 40 I’ll look back and say, ‘I was a badass 22-year-old," she said. "But now I’m a lot more laid-back and even-keeled. And I know people need a little break from me sometimes."
Review - 3 ½ stars out of 4
By Kevin Bronson
Elizabeth Elmore has been hurt - by boyfriends, by the breakup of her band Sarge after a quarter-note in the spotlight in 1998, by "so-called friends" who vanished after she shelved her pop aspirations to focus on her Northwestern Law School studies. But her piquant dissection fo such transgressions on her new band’s upcoming debut resists fits of sulking or rage.
Duplicity and rejection, loyalty and self-reliance - it’s pretty much the same mud fellow Midwesterner wallowed in, but Elmore bakes it with resolve, guitars firing, keyboards fluttering, drums struggling mightily to keep up. One stride ahead of the pop/punk rattle, Elmore’s flat-like-an-angel vocals belie some of her songs’ feral content: "You’ve learned to play the victim perfectly/If everything’s my fault you’re not to blame/ for all your simpering diatribes on how I’ve caused you so much pain."
Her streaming anecdotes give the listener the feeling of walking right into the middle of life-altering events. Maybe, now the Elmore is hitting the clubs and not the law library, we have. The Reputation performs tonight at Chain Reacion in Anaheim, Monday at Spaceland in Silver Lake and Wednesday at the Glass House in Pomona.