emilysavage@sfbg.com

Tofu and Whiskey The phrase "'woman' is not a genre" has been popping up again. It's been in articles, board threads, and subsequently, conversations I've been a part of. It's a good one. Kind of an earworm of a saying, because on its face, it's implicit, simplistic, obvious, even. But it's a good mantra, for music writers. "Woman" is not a genre.

Maybe it's a backlash against Rolling Stone's recent, ridiculous "women who rock" package, which sought out the "best" woman in rock with votes from readers, and somehow ended up with cloying pop act Karmin plastered across the cover, cleavage-y as all Rolling Stone cover ladies. Can you imagine a "best white guy in rock" contest in RS?

But this is nothing new. As far as I can trace it, Little Boots said "'girl' is not a genre" in 2009, but — seeing as how it's so gosh darn simple — it's got to have been uttered previously, and certainly, undoubtedly, felt since the first time a woman picked up a different instrument from her female neighbor, and got thrown in concert together.

It was the headline and thesis of a piece on Electronic Beats about the rise of thinkpieces sputtering about a supposed rise of women making electronic music, another fallacy; it's just the cheap shots in feature pieces clumping heterogeneous acts together again.

One of the only things linking all ladies of wildly divergent sounds at this point is the gendered showcases, or gendered comparisons. That's not to say all comparisons are entirely inaccurate, they just frequently are made based on little more than appearance.

Ash Reiter, the frontperson for her eponymous East Bay band, saw plenty of comparisons after the release of her first album, Paper Diamonds, in 2010, with passing references to Fleetwood Mac and Cat Power, both of whom she admires. The singer-songwriter-guitarist was also hoping to sound like a mix of Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Grizzly Bear, and OK, Jolie Holland.

Now, Reiter and her band have taken that sound for a walk in another direction. With the new LP, Hola — which see release on 20 Sided Records Fri/30 with a show at the Rickshaw Stop (8:30pm, $10. 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com) — the local musicians took notes more from bubbly 1960s pop and classic Motown cuts, arrangements interspersed with bits of funk and Afro-pop.

"With our first album, I was in a folkier place with a lot of those songs, doing the Jolie Holland thing, which, you know, I cut my teeth singing along to her songs," says Reiter, remarkably cheerful on the phone the afternoon before her current 54-day tour ends. "But I've gotten more excited about writing more upbeat pop songs with grooves to them, and working with my band to write music instead of writing it alone."

On this tour, Reiter and her drummer Will Halsey went to the Motown Museum in Detroit, which was particularly meaningful because of its influence on Hola: "that's a lot of the music we look up to. Of course, [we've always looked up to] the Beatles and the Beach Boys, but also all these girl groups, the Ronettes, and the Shirelles, and the Crystals. And we definitively imitated a lot of what we heard in the background vocals listening to the Supremes."