I know what you’re thinking. Female musician: some timid little thing singing her pretty, melodic folk songs, strumming her acoustic guitar in a coffee shop. No, wrong. Take that girl and load her up on caffeine. Grow her up on Joan Jett and Letters to Cleo; Hole and Green Day; Led Zeppelin and Heart. Now piss her off: take that acoustic guitar and smash it. Tell her girls can’t play, let alone rock. Push her right up to the edge. Now hand her an electric guitar, crank up the volume, and surround her with a band of the same.

That’s Baltimore-based Odd Girl Out: 4 girls, 60% power-pop, 30% bubblegum-punk, 10% melodic rock, and 100% tired of playing by your rules since 2004. OGO is Tawni on lead vocals, Bethany Petr on drums and vocals, Eva Blackmer on bass guitar and vocals, and Selena Benally on guitar and vocals.

The following are excerpts taken from the No Cover article by Raymond Cummings.

Odd Girl Out was born in late 2004, when Petr, Tawni, and a few others broke away from a blues/swing cover band to form a different breed of cover outfit--one that specialized in pop-punk and rock songs, often those recorded by female artists.Among the band's staples were songs by the Bangles, the Killers, Jill Sobule, and Hole. Until, that is, Petr tried her hand at songwriting for the first time and discovered a knack for it.

"The first song I wrote was about how crappy and annoying the band we had left was," she remembers. "We later revamped it, and it's now our song `Lost in Translation.' [It's] no longer about that other band."

The tunes--which eventually became thunderous potential hits that owe as much to '80s rocker Joan Jett as they do to '90s riot-grrrl band Bikini Kill--kept coming.

"It's harder for us because there aren't a lot of female musicians that are into what we do--they're too old or too young or into folk," explains Tawni, who sweetly dodges the question of OGO's ages by giving the band's averaged age as 24. "People don't understand what it takes to be in a band. They think we don't practice or play very much, and that's not us."

...Wait is a surprisingly composed, coiled, and concise initial salvo. Lyrically, Petr's protagonists are women faced with dangerous, difficult, or just plain frustrating traps they can't avoid, and who respond by flipping the drama until they're in control. Tawni's belted, passionate delivery is carried along by the sort of off-the-cuff, three-chord attack and walloping drums that recall Letters to Cleo and a pair of underrated, femme-fronted '90s punk bands--little-known New York trio Fur and Oakland, Calif.'s fiery, uncompromising Tilt.

At times, Wait resembles a kick-ass empowerment seminar--or the ideal CD to blast en route to a girls' night out. The album's liner-note photos suggest a group of vastly dissimilar women thrown together, a last-ones-picked-for-the-team quintet lacking a unifying mind-set or fashion aesthetic: goth, grrrl, glam, and granola. Indeed, members are so scattered--geographically, vocationally, and in terms of musical influences--that their dedication to OGO appears all the more incredible.

Soft-spoken...Selena Benally, on guitar, is a full-time student at the College of Southern Maryland and a Metallica fan. Petr digs Green Day and teaches computer programming at the Silver Spring high school she attended. Tawni, who grew up in Baltimore but today resides in Cockeysville, is a nanny and is partial to Madonna and Queen. Blackmer grew up in St. Mary's County on a steady diet of "angry girl music" like Hole and Bikini Kill; she calls Greenbelt home and works at the Maryland Center for Environmental Training.