In "Get Up" filmed by Miranda July as the band's first music video , Tucker talks her desire out in classic Gordonian form, modulating her signature trills into something quite wistful.
At one point, someone interjects the loveliest "whoo! But it doesn't really matter; they'd weathered both a breakup and a brighter spotlight, their sonic synchronicity only gaining force. While her vocals tend toward the placid on the record, she's assisted by the usual guitar intricacy and Tucker's able vocal support. They were stopped cold in the artists' reception tent; on a chalkboard listing the lodging assignments, someone had scrawled "ladymen -- yes" next to the number of their chalet.
They duly converted the tone-deaf joke into "Ballad Of A Ladyman," a stunning combination of glam Bowie and adult alternative wherein Tucker croons about the pressure to conform, something the band still faced, even as they continued to annex exciting new territory.
According to the band, even at this late date people were still asking when they were going to add a bassist. They didn't want one, they didn't need one, but unlike the White Stripes pretty early into their career at this point , some still saw its absence as a bug, not a feature. Ask Prince: conjuring a bass is a much cooler trick.
On a pair of All Hands ' lean rock and rollers, you'd swear someone is holding down the low-end. Perhaps it's that beautiful harmony on the final chorus. Five albums in, it's clear that S-K still had every intention of having fun and surprising on their hard-won terms. Tucker drops a few obvious French signifiers on both "Male Model" and "Milkshake N' Honey": the former cheerfully offers to re-gender the rock hierarchy; the latter finds Tucker dropping into her lower register for a louche tale of a Parisian fling.
In a scene that was still a couple years away from thinking it had invented dancing, Sleater-Kinney kept cranking out booty-shaking, sub-three-minute feminist anthems. Call The Doctor For a document so quickly executed, the debut was a hell of a thing.
Call The Doctor adds to the palette while exhibiting a keener sense of sequencing. Sleater-Kinney has the two shortest songs in the band's catalog -- either of which could have been a ripping opener -- and closes with three straight tracks with the word "song" in the title.
Brownstein ups her vocal contributions, offering soaring countermelodies on "Stay Where You Are," high-flown support on "Hubcap," rejoinders on the title track. Macfarlane keeps the kit on lock, an improvement on her work on the debut -- understandable, given the compressed nature of Sleater-Kinney 's recording. According to Wikipedia, she played guitar on the wide-eyed closer "Heart Attack," which, just like debut's "The Last Song," is sung by Brownstein. Her screaming stands in stark contrast to the gentle arpeggiation, just another example of the band's capability to subvert expectations.
At this point in their career -- and, really, very rarely afterward -- Sleater-Kinney did not deal in quietude. As writers and singers, Tucker and Brownstein masterfully forsook vulnerability; the sentiments were raw, even incendiary, but like their scene forebears, they're presented as inquiries, not apologies.
Even "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" -- the most well-known track on Call The Doctor -- though it explodes with gleeful see-saw yowls on the refrain, it mostly crawls forward on the low end, accruing that death-drive energy. The title can certainly scan as twee, but Tucker claims a different kind of desire, crowning herself "the queen of rock and roll. At the same time, Sleater-Kinney were staking their claim to the kind of plaudits accorded all too infrequently to bands masterminded by women.
Soon enough, this song would look like a prophecy; at the time, it must have seemed like an astounding wish. One Beat As Tom Breihan noted in his excellent year commemoration of One Beat , circumstances both political and profoundly personal influenced its creation. She had given birth five months prior to a baby born nine weeks early. Tucker rejoined the group with a singular experience of motherhood.
Sleater-Kinney began as a side project — something for Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker to do when not occupied with their main bands Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, respectively or coursework. Every album from then on until The Woods , their seventh and final album from their initial run, saw their sound and audience grow, to the point where they were consistently appearing on end-of-the-year lists and opening for Pearl Jam. And then they were gone; Sleater-Kinney had burned so hot and so bright for so long that Brownstein, Tucker, and Weiss needed to retreat from the heat, all pursuing other musical projects.
Brownstein, meanwhile, branched out into acting with a little comedy show called Portlandia. Then, just as suddenly as they disappeared, Sleater-Kinney re-emerged in October with the revelation that their eighth album was soon to follow. That album, No Cities to Love , was as stunning a comeback as one could have hoped for, the sound of a band still restless after a long slumber and still finding new ways to shake things up.
Liner Notes June 25 Video Countdown December 1 Pitchfork Music Festival August 4 Skip to content Search query All Results. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music. Top Stories. Sleater-Kinney Path of Wellness. On the Road, Again. On the Road, Again In an uncertain post-vaccine landscape, musicians and other touring professionals are feeling the elation—and anxiety—of getting back to work. The beat throughout most of Dig Me Out is relentless, a kind of monomaniacally focused tunnelling that practically causes you to vibrate while listening.
On The Woods, their first album for Sub Pop, they storm the barricades, employing Dave Fridmann to produce this steaming, swaggering hard-rock opus indebted to Hendrix and Zeppelin.
The overlapping vocal layers in the title track, and the way the existential Get Up fizzes like the last millimetres of a dynamite wick, constantly threatening to blow, foreground the disquiet at its heart.
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