Dead Sara, Dead Sara

When I first heard Dead Sara, I didn’t know exactly what to make of the band. I knew that they had a quality of rock that made them sound like a harder version of Melissa Etheridge. That was as far as I got in my ideas, and then something very simple and ordinary happened: I heard the song “Weatherman” on the radio. That’s when this whole album fell into place perfectly for me.

First off, this album makes me feel old. It’s my fault because of how I relate to it, but I think if the music sounded differently I wouldn’t relate to it the way that I do, so… Let’s just call it a chicken-egg thing and move on.

In my teenage years, when I was a bit older of a teen and allowed to be dropped off at shows with friends, I attended many radio-sponsored festivals. In many ways, I feel like these festivals no longer exist. Okay, I actually attended one many years ago headlined by Candlebox (hey, stop laughing), and I don’t think that these festivals stopped occurring — actually, I know for a fact that they didn’t stop, and many sources reinforce that belief — but rather it was more of me growing out of them. What was once cool to me — going to see some headlining radio bands, mixed with one-hit radio bands and then maybe some unknown bands — was a formula that I could accept in 1996, for example, but found even a bit tiresome in 2006.

A lot of good bands came out of the radio festival show scene many years ago — Everclear and Local H, to name two — but there always seemed to be that one token female-fronted band, as well. Whether it was K’s Choice, Letters to Cleo, Veruca Salt, Dance Hall Crashers, Juliana Hatfield, or L7 (whom I coincidentally saw get booed off the stage once), there was always this sort of kick-ass, female-fronted rock band that was a part of my teenage years. It was kind of like how you can’t have Nirvana without Hole, but you know, without the whole Courtney Love deal.

To me, Dead Sara represents that era of female-fronted rock band that I grew up with, in the sense that I’d hear one of their songs on the radio and then they’d disappear, but of course I’d keep their full-length album and love the non-radio songs so much more.

Dead Sara is, quite simply put, a band that has released this self-titled album in 2012 but could very easily fit in back in the mid/late 1990s. I could see these songs on the soundtracks for movies like Tank Girl, Empire Records, Mallrats, and Singles. Don’t think that makes this music sound dated in any way, though. It definitely still has a fresh sound to it.

At first, I listened to this album through maybe once or twice and was still undecided about it. Now, after hearing it a few more times through, I can tell you that this rock band that may or may not be bringing grunge back can really rock, and this album not only gets better as it progresses, but it also gets better with every listen.