Nearly 20 years ago, when Sleater-Kinney released their towering seventh album, “The Woods,” a compelling case could be made that the trio was the most vital and underrated American rock band working.
Born from the fervent feminist spirit of the riot grrrl movement and the fertile DIY scene of the Pacific Northwest, the group spent the second half of the '90s releasing increasingly sophisticated punk albums and finally, with their righteous 2002 release, “One Beat,” matured into one. one of the few indie-rock bands to make meaningful protest music after 9/11.
In “The Woods,” Sleater-Kinney managed to speed things up even further. The nervous electricity of Carrie Brownstein's guitar, the embodied howl of Corin Tucker's voice, and the trembling force of Janet Weiss's drums collided in a glorious cacophony, producing a noise that sounded less like songs than melodic storms.
There are faint echoes of that fury on “Little Rope,” Sleater-Kinney’s 11th album and second since Weiss’s departure in 2019. The new LP has more oomph and darkness than the band’s 2021 self-produced LP, “Path of Wellness”, and more. emotional resonance than their mechanical 2019 effort “The Center Won’t Hold.” But even in its wildest moments, compared to the band's most powerful work, “Little Rope” sounds unfortunately diminished and curiously restrained.
Many of these songs are messages of the agony of sudden grief: while writing the album, Brownstein's mother and stepfather died in a car accident while on vacation in Italy. The guitarist and singer conveys the numbness that followed on tracks like the mid-tempo mirror talk “Dress Yourself” (“Get up, girl, and get dressed/The clothes you love for a world you hate”) and, even more effectively, the upbeat “Don't Feel Right.” “I get up, I make a list,” Brownstein sings in his squeaky tone, “what I'll do once it's settled.” His own spiky guitar riff snaps her out of his stupor, like an energetic dog barking his depressed owner out of bed.
Tucker, the more primal singer of the two, exorcises deeper emotions when she sings, as on the haunting and moving opener “Hell.” Brownstein often relies on staccato enunciation and clever wordplay, but here Tucker shows the undulating sentiment she can express in a single word: “Whhhhhyyyy?”
When Sleater-Kinney is at its best, Tucker and Brownstein's contrasting voices and musical personalities reinforce each other: consider the layered vocals and intricately intertwined harmonies that provide the solid backbone of the band's 1999 album, “The Hot Rock”. That back-and-forth is largely absent on “Little Rope,” which is surprising given that the band is now a duo. Here, Brownstein and Tucker don't seem to be in dialogue as much, which gives many of these songs a one-dimensionality.
Weiss's absence, however, is the most obvious lack. Some bands can remove or change a drummer without altering their sound much, but Sleater-Kinney is not one of those bands, and Weiss is not one of those drummers. (The percussion on “Little Rope” is credited to both the band's touring drummer, Angie Boylan, and the album's producer, John Congleton, who first worked with Sleater-Kinney.) Weiss' style in Sleater-Kinney was as muscular as it was agile. , grounding the band's sound as he leads their charge. By contrast, the tempos of many of these newer songs feel relatively lethargic, the tracks made flimsy by their lack of bass bombast. This is most evident on the sleepy “Crusader,” an apparent rebuttal to the recent moral panic that lacks – largely due to its thin percussion – urgency and bite.
Ultimately, Brownstein and Tucker seem caught between their storied past and a more open future. It's telling that one of the best songs on the album, the elegant and moving “Say It Like You Mean It,” is the one that plays least like a Sleater-Kinney song: it's a relatively straightforward synth-pop number that Tucker imbues with pearly pathos. Weiss left the band while Brownstein and Tucker were taking steps to take it in a more pop direction, but its pop sensibility has been dulled by interruptions of dissonance that attempted to evoke Sleater-Kinney's past. They are certainly out of the woods now, but they seem unsure of where to venture next.
Sleater-Kinney
“Little rope”
(Loma Vista)
