Asked how he and his wife and musical partner, Gretta Rochelle, met, My Gold Mask guitarist Jack Armondo admits, “We were both kinda drunk.” It was at someone’s Fourth of July party in 2002, and after discovering that they were compatible musically as well as romantically, they got serious on both fronts. Their first project became the popular local “sex rock” band Bang! Bang!, with Rochelle (aka “Gretta Fine”) on bass, Armondo (aka “Jack Flash”) on guitar, both on vocals, and a series of drummers behind them. Late last year the group just sort of fizzled out, the couple say; after nearly a year of inactivity, they got together for one final show this past August.
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My Gold Mask, which they released themselves as a download and on cassette, is an odd record. Most songs consist of a skeletal guitar part—mostly leads rather than chords, doused in effects that usually seem to include an octave pedal—drums played on a two-piece kit, vocals by Rochelle with occasional backups by Armondo, and almost nothing else. The combination of the primitivist thump they kick up and Rochelle’s showy, nasal vocals makes me want to coin a new genre for them: Delta cabaret.
“It was amazing,” he says. “I’d never heard her sing that way before.” Rochelle’s voice is noticeably stronger and more self-assured than it ever sounded in Bang! Bang!, and she’s exchanged her snotty punk delivery for a theatrical, vibrato-laden style of belting.
The freedom to experiment is one of the things Armondo sees as an improvement over his experience in Bang! Bang! “When you’re in a rock band like that,” he explains, “people expect something from it, and if you go off on a tangent or something then the people that are going to the show are like, ‘What is this?’ And the people that might appreciate that, they aren’t going to expect you to be doing that so they’re not going to be at the show to check it out.”
