Sleater-Kinney

In the small city of Olympia in Washington state, in the days of the "riot-grrrrls", Corin Tucker got her start as the singer for Heavens To Betsy. This band produced a single album, Calculated (Kill Rock Stars, 1994), on which tragic teenage stories such as Waitress Hell and Stay Away stood out. In its universe of abortion, rape, prostitution and betrayal, there was nothing one could do but scream. (The other half of the group, Tracy Sawyer, would go on to form The Lies).

Sleater-Kinney is a joint project with fellow guitarist and singer Carrie Brownstein of Excuse 17 (who put out Such Friends Are Dangerous, on which Watchmaker appears). The songs on the mini-album Sleater-Kinney (Chainsaw, 1995), such as Sold Out and Her Again, suggest Courtney Love as an initial influence. The duo do a better job of articulating their dialectic on Call The Doctor (Chainsaw, 1995), one of the landmark albums of late foxcore, where the raw harmonies of Bikini Kill are combined with chilling lyrics. Effectively following the same blueprint as Watchmaker, these twelve songs, taking up barely half an hour, represent the state of the art in women's culture. Much of the emotion is realized in the vocal parts, with the instrumentation being subordinate to the melodrama. Tucker's terrified screaming creates some exceptional moments of pathos, as in I'm Not Waiting, and the two girls deliver vocal harmonies that are as ungainly as they are epic, for example in Stay Where You Are and I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. Pale attempts at musicality result in a tribal Hubcap, a mesmerizing Anonymous, and an agitated Little Mouth. But ultimately there is little on this album that can be called musical, as chilling as it is as a social document.

Drummer Laura MacFarlane left the group to form Ninetynine, releasing 99 (Endearing, 1997) shortly after.

The rough quality of the band's sound is remedied on their follow-up Dig Me Out (Kill Rock Stars, 1997), which features veteran drummer Janet Weiss. Whereas Turn It On and Not What You Want have the roughness and propulsion of garage-rock, Words and Guitar and Little Babies (the latter of which mimics Mother's Little Helper by the Stones) play with vocal harmonies. The curious experiment Dance Song '97 and the haunting, tension-filled melodrama of Jenny complete the work. These reporters of yesteryear, who sent telegraphic dispatches from the feminist front soaked in menstrual blood, attempt to promote themselves as musicians on this record. Unfortunately, Tucker is not much of a singer, and almost every song is ruined by her wild snarl. It's one thing to scream in anguish, but it's another thing entirely to sing a melody. Big Big Lights (1998) is the single of the era.

As guitarists, the girls are in fine form on The Hot Rock (Kill Rock Stars, 1999), the most musical album of their career. However, both of them are awful singers, and the more professional production ends up exposing their flaws more than their merits. Start Together and Burn, Don't Freeze are up to par, but too many songs are only worthwhile for the messages of their lyrics. The Size Of Our Love and A Quarter To Three have perhaps the catchiest choruses.

Sleater-Kinney are considered by many to be the ultimate spokeswomen for the "riot grrrl" movement; in effect, they are the culmination of ten years of music for women. On the legacy of proto-riot grrrrl like Patti Smith and X-Ray Spex, these two Seattle-based singer-songwriters have built a small monument to women's independence in music.

Sleater-Kinney kept moving towards a more psychological and less visceral sound with All Hands On The Bad One (Kill Rock Stars, 2000). The girls have learned how to control their voices and how to make them duet in a very persuasive and effective manner. So much so that songs have become chats: the two voices are two different personae that interact, overlap, argue, sympathize and clash. Carrie Brownstein has become more of a singer and less of a shouter. She can modulate a tune as well as any pop singer. Corin Tucker's raging, neurotic shrills are still very much to the center, echoing a Patti Smith without the religious fervor and sometimes regressing to pre-natal screams. Janet Weiss' solemn pow-wow tempos give the songs a bit of extra-epos.
Signs of impending adulthood are everywhere. Their trademark angst is mutating into Television-style guitar neurosis (The Ballad Of A Ladyman). All Hands On The Bad One careens on a surf beat with soaring B52s vocal harmonies. Leave You Behind sounds like a sunny country ballad with West-Coast harmonies and a touch of psychedelic trance, even if the subject is a loss. New forms, namely a catchy and sarcastic singalong (You're No Rock'n'Roll Fun) and a reverb-drenched impressionistic vignette (The Swimmer), complement their raw and wild rock and roll dances (Ironclad, Youth Decay). The metamorphosis from political icons to musicians is far from complete, but well on its way.

Cadallaca is the duo of Corin Tucker and Sarah Dougher.

One Beat (Kill Rock Stars, 2002) is the album that keeps the promise of Call The Doctor. The band is a mature, determined, tight entity that deals with issues the way Chuck Berry did: rhythm, riff and sarcasm. The anthemic Combat Rock, the gritty One Beat, the catchy Oh constitute the front line of a raucous and militant album that revitalizes the sound of Sleater-Kinney. The band also dares introduce rhythm'n'blues, soul, garage and electronic arrangements, such as the marching-band brass section of in Step Aside and the theremin in Funeral Song. The mixture of boldness and sophistication yields a satisfying hybrid of mainstream pop and riot-grrrrls anger (The Remainder, Hollywood Ending, Step Aside, Light Rail Coyote).

The best parts of The Woods (SubPop, 2005), such as The Fox, What's Mine is Yours (with one of Carrie Brownstein's best solos), Entertain and the 11-minute Let's Call it Love, hark back to the hard blues-rock sounds of the Sixties.

Corin Tucker formed her solo band after her previous band, Sleater-Kinney, went on hiatus. The debut, 1,000 Years (Kill Rock Stars, 2010), retained much of the aggresive nature and sound of her previous work, but emmersed it in more layers of lush arrangements and production value than found in Sleater-Kinney.

Sleater-Kinney's vocalist Corin Tucker formed her own band with ex-Circus Lupus' bassist Seth Lorinczi and Unwound's drummer Sara Lund, that debuted with 1,000 Years (Kill Rock Stars, 2010). Not much is left of her punkish in-your-face vocals in these poppy songs. She sounds romantic when she intones 1,000 Years over a saloon-like honkytonk beat and against a mildly psychedelic reverbed guitar. The contrast is even stronger in Handed Love that juxtaposes her lame litany with incandescent instrumental jamming. She poses halfway between the naive heroine and the anthemic punkette in Half A World Away. It's Always Summer alternates between a folkish lullaby for a naive songster that she is not and a rhythm'n'blues roar for a raucous shouter that she is not; and something similar happens in Big Goodbye, rarefied tenderness morphing into explosive garage-rock. She recovers a bit of her devilish persona for the pounding square dance Doubt, the one song in which vocals and sounds go hand in hand. At the other end of the spectrum lie the acoustic songs: Dragon, a soaring hymn a` la Jefferson Starship, and the piano elegy Miles Away in the vein of Joni Mitchell. Nothing memorable, and nothing that hasn't been before (many times), but certainly a honest and passionate statement.

Helium's Mary Timony formed the all-female super-group Wild Flag with the Minders' Rebecca Cole, and Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss.

Corin Tucker formed her own band that debuted with 1,000 Years (2010).

After a ten-year hiatus, Sleater-Kinney returned with No Cities to Love (Sub Pop, 2015), a guitar-heavy album that certainly lives up to the standards of the early albums in the angular Price Tag, the catchy Fangless, and Surface Envy, a "riot grrrl"-era anthem with missile guitar. Even better is Fade, a blend of Guns 'N Roses-style melodramatic street-metal and a tribal dissonant cabaret skit.

Sleater-Kinney's ninth studio album, The Center Won't Hold (2019), produced by Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent), marked a major commercial sell-out with Can I Go On and Reach Out, songs that evoke dance-pop of Blondie-era new wave.

Path of Wellness (2021), the first album without Weiss, is even more shameless in trying to build trivial songs around trivial melodies. This edition of the band indulges in the syncopated quasi-soul Path of Wellness, imitates British pub-rock of the 1980s (Joe Jackson, early Elvis Costello) in Favorite Neighbor, and sounds like a softer version of Heart in the catchy Bring Mercy, probably the ditty around which the album was created.