Plush band members rock harder than most anyone
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.
It started slowly, as the opening band’s intro music played to a quiet audience at Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino.
Plush ripped into their opening number, “Athena,” pounding away at power chords and sending vocals soaring into the rafters. Just before the guitar solo, everything stopped while singer and rhythm guitarist Moriah Formica played a dramatic chord, and the first whoops emanated from the crowd.
The crowd roared in recognition of their cover of Heart’s “Barracuda,” on which Formica uncannily channels Ann Wilson (something few singers on this planet can do), and cheered even louder at its completion.
Each successive song got more applause until the end of their 30-minute set left much of the crowd on its feet, giving a standing ovation to a band few of them had heard of when they bought tickets to see the headliner, Slash.
It’s been like this for months now for Plush, the all-female, impossibly young metal quartet from upstate New York that is breathing new life into hard rock and putting to rest, once and for all, the misguided and misogynistic notion that girls can’t rock as hard as guys.
Anyone who has ever heard Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Joan Jett, Lita Ford, Deborah Harry of Blondie, Pat Benatar, Janis Joplin, Starship’s Grace Slick, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, Melissa Etheridge or Tina Turner knows just how ridiculous that viewpoint is. And yet it persists in some quarters.
“Rock ‘n’ roll is thought to be a hard, aggressive, just in-your-face kind of rawness,” said Formica. “Unfortunately, a lot of people think women aren’t aggressive. There are women who rock – and rock hard – but it’s still like,
‘It’s a girl, it’s laughable.’ That’s a big reason why women haven’t necessarily been as recognized as men in rock because they’re not ‘hard enough,’ which is so untrue. Women can be freakin’ vicious!”
Plush is vicious, melodic, sensitive and bombastic, all at once. Their selftitled debut album last October was loved by critics, and they’ve been touring virtually nonstop with the likes of Halestorm and Evanescence – woman-led bands who are idols to all four members of Plush – along with gigs with Daughtry, Sevendust, Mammoth WVH and most recently Slash.
Their influences also include female rock icons, but these young women cut their musical teeth on the likes of Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Alice In Chains and Skid Row.
They’ve clearly done their homework on what came before. Lead guitarist Bella Perron (the Maine native is the only non-New Yorker in Plush) grew up thinking Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley “was just the coolest human being on the planet.” Asked for the best guitar riff in history, she immediately offered up Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Her favorite solo is Randy Rhoads’ mind-melting shred in Ozzy Osbourne’s “Over The Mountain.”
Bassist Ashley Suppa’s favorite bass line is the bouncy, melodic foundation of Paul McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs,” and there’s no cooler drum intro for Brooke Colucci than Zep’s “When the Levee Breaks.”
They’ve also mastered the tiny details, from Perron’s finger-flick riff during the second verse of “Barracuda” to her high leg kick to punctuate a particular power chord – things Heart’s Nancy Wilson has done for decades.