Manda and the Marbles: Shy Loudmouth
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, March-April 2005

It was in Columbus, Ohio, sometime in the mid-’90s when local band Dick, Jane and Sally was hired to play at a frat party and took the opportunity to break up in the process. “It’s a long story,” explains Manda Marble, who was playing guitar at the time, “but I ended up getting into a verbal altercation with the people there. And the rest of my band, they said they had enough of me and they couldn’t take it any more.”

Well, not everyone. Taking guitarist Joe A. Damage with her, Marble switched to bass and formed Manda and the Marbles, whose latest album, Angels With Dirty Faces (Sickhouse), finds them looking beyond the walls of fraternity houses with a sound reminiscent of the punky, keyboard-laced guitar pop of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though Marble bristles slightly at the mention of the words “New Wave” – “That’s, like, twenty years ago” – the album features a pair of covers from 1979 (which was 26 years ago, for those keeping track): a chorus-only runthrough of the Fast Cars’ “Kids Just Wanna Dance” and a version of the Avengers’ “Cheap Tragedies” playing dress-up as “When You Were Mine.”


Thank Mark Slak for those: Marble says that her drummer, who’s a fan of “Seventies punk hardcore stuff that I can’t even listen to,” is the one who brought the songs to the attention of the band, while Damage is the resident ’80s metalhead. As for her own tastes, Marble admits, “I’ve been getting into, oddly enough, jazz and big band stuff, which is nothing like what we play, of course."

That onstage/offstage dichotomy shows up in other ways as well. “I’m actually kind of a shy person,” says Marble, who admits to a small degree of stagefright resulting from the piano recitals of her childhood (before she was, to the dismay of her parents and her piano teacher, ruined by rock ‘n’ roll just like so many before her). “So whenever people find out that I do this, they’re kind of shocked. But I guess if you really get to know me, I’m kind of a loudmouth.”

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