Matthew Yglesias: Sleater-Kinney

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Sleater-Kinney

Great show last night -- you can hear it on NPR's webcast if you're so inclined. I think Marisa Meltzer's piece on the band in Slate is very good as well. I'll proclaim One Beat my favorite S-K album.

August 4, 2006 | Permalink

Comments

I'll vote for "All Hands," although I have to forgive the record store clerk in Chicago who asked me, "Is this for your daughter?" And that was seven years ago!

Posted by: Mark Schmitt | Aug 4, 2006 12:26:46 PM

See, I think All Hands is the worst. When it came out, I thought it was okay, but also decided the band was now destined for a downward spiral of increasing badness. "You're No Rock and Roll Fun" is sort of the best thing ever, though.

Posted by: Matthew Yglesias | Aug 4, 2006 12:31:51 PM

Meltzer's article is really good, although she doesn't point out that the musical style in One Beat was very different from anything they'd done before, which is partly what makes it so great. I remember getting (and liking) Dig Me Out back in 10th grade or whenever, but then thinking that Sleater-Kinney was just a generic, if good, rock band for a bunch of years. Then One Beat came out and there was less shrieking and more Carrie Brownstein and better songs, and, of course, more horns and keyboards. You can never go wrong with more horns and keyboards. Plus the title track was fantastic.

The Woods is really good too, but not as "novel" as One Beat, I think, which sounds weird to say, but that's how I've always seen it. So they probably picked the right time to break up, before getting stale again.

Posted by: Brad Plumer | Aug 4, 2006 1:34:33 PM

Agreed that AHOTBO is their nadir -- which only means B+ or so. (The bar is set very high.) And you're wrong about YNRnRF -- far from the best thing ever. A great idea, but it gets turgid awfully fast (esp. live -- so relieved not to hear it last night).

Best albums?

Dig Me Out and Hot Rock, although I can see the case for the Woods, if you're of a certain mind (others hate the power-blues moves).

Best songs? Gosh -- that's a tall order. I'd start with One More Hour; Joey Ramone; Dance Song '97; Start Together; Sympathy; and Jumpers. Choosing from among those, however -- and Youth Decay and End of You and . . . -- please don't make me do it.

Also, agreed that the Meltzer piece is very good for what they've signified socially (no small thing); but she skimps on just how amazing they've been *musically,* especially since Janet: Even if they had been channeling Mel Gibson, the performances would be mesmerizing, undeniable, pinch-me-I-must-be dreaming, pure magic. And of course, it's a thousand times better than that, because their themes, their insights, their obsessions, have been decidedly un-Gibson-like.

I can barely stand the notion that I might never see them together again. And I'm a 45-year-old guy.

Posted by: Marty Lederman | Aug 4, 2006 1:44:26 PM

That's kind of how I feel about The Hot Rock. Definitely my least favorite SK album overall, but Get Up is one of my favorite songs.

Posted by: MattT | Aug 4, 2006 2:07:06 PM

The best SK record is The Hot Rock. We can have this debate if you want, but it really is The Hot Rock. One Beat and The Woods are an astonishingly close second and third. And yet we got *only one Hot Rock song last night*, "The End of You."

I was underwhelmed by the Meltzer article. The bland point she wants to make is that time passes S-K by until Meltzer notices the sophistication of One Beat. How she could have avoided the radical reinvention of Sleater-Kinney that occurs between Dig Me Out and The Hot Rock is mindboggling. The band that Meltzer mythologizes stops existing after Call The Doctor. (Which is my favorite sentimental S-K record, and yesterday I even e-mailed the girl I went to high school with who, for me, will always be the girl who inspired "Good Things.")

Posted by: Spencer | Aug 4, 2006 2:26:30 PM

Spencer, good to see you're an S-K obsessive, too. Actually they played three songs last night from Hot Rock -- End of You, Burn Don't Freeze and Get Up.

Which is typical -- as Carrie said during the show, they think of DC as a Hot Rock kind of crowd, and almost always play multiple numbers from it. The only surprise last night was no "Start Together," which might be their best ever.

Posted by: Marty Lederman | Aug 4, 2006 2:41:28 PM

One Beat? Really? Yes, Sympathy and Light Rail Coyote are great and a number of the other songs (Faraway, One Beat, Step Aside) are very good, but there's a lot more chaff on that album than others (The Remainder, Funeral Song, Prisstina, Hollywood Ending). And, while I liked Combat Rock when the album first came out, I'm just not feeling it anymore. I'd much rather listen to DMO or The Woods or Hot Rock.

Posted by: Becks | Aug 4, 2006 2:46:07 PM

Marty has embarassed me. I have absolutely no recollection of "Burn Don't Freeze" or "Get Up." Also, how can you break up without performing "One More Hour"? What's up with that.

Also, griping about setlist choices aside, we should note that the truly big omission was Marty Lederman not informing the D.C.-area S-K fans that he'd be in attendance.

Posted by: Spencer | Aug 4, 2006 2:46:21 PM

"Combat Rock" still sends chills up my spine. And "Far Away" eerily captures how 9/11 actually sounded to an indie rock audience. On that song Janet Weiss goes from being a great drummer to a sublime one.

Posted by: Spencer | Aug 4, 2006 2:49:40 PM

The Hot Rock is a good one, but it's always seemed very disjointed to me. Like S-K knew they didn't want to make another Dig Me Out, but couldn't quite figure out where to go. "Don't Talk Like" and "End of You" and "God Is a Number" are all wonderful songs in their own rights but it seems like they don't quite fit well together on the same album. But I also haven't listened to it in a long, long time and the line between aimlessness and radical reinvention usually isn't very thick, so I guess I could be totally off-base about this.

Posted by: Brad Plumer | Aug 4, 2006 2:51:12 PM

Brad, when you begin your internship I will order you to undergo a cycle of Hot Rock remediation. No other S-K record--even One Beat--possesses such thematic unity. And the songs are good too.

Posted by: Spencer | Aug 4, 2006 2:55:50 PM

Your short-term memory must really be fading, Spencer: "embarrassed" has two "r"s. Next thing you know, you'll be forgetting Corin's speech about how she agrees with me on signing statements . . . . ;-) (Speaking of which, this inspired work might as well be called the Secret Life of David Addington:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/8/4monks.html)

With (at least) three prof-bloggers present, Georgetown was probably among the better-represented law faculties at last night's incendiary concert. Other than the Constitution Hall show, I don't think I've missed an S-K gig here since they, uh, changed my life at the Black Cat in March 1998.

FWIW, last night's setlist:

1. One Beat
2. Not What You Want
3. Wilderness
4. The Fox
5. Jumpers
6. #1 Must Have
7. Steep Air
8. Rollercoaster
9. Burn Don't Freeze
10. Night Light
11. End of You
12. What's Mine Is Yours
13. Modern Girl
14. Let's Call It Love
15. Entertain
16. Little Babies

17. Ironclad
18. Get Up
19. Buy Her Candy (while Janet was repairing her snare drum)
20. Turn It On
21. Dance Song '97
22. Words & Guitar

23. Sympathy
24. Dig Me Out

Posted by: Marty Lederman | Aug 4, 2006 2:59:30 PM

How you could forget "Burn, Don't Freeze" amazes me, Spencer. That was the highlight of my night.

While One Beat isn't my favorite album now, I definitely think it was one of those "right albums at the right time". It meant a lot to me post-9/11 and, while I don't feel it aged as well as some of their other ones and is as timeless, it did an amazing job of capturing the immediate emotions of the time. (I saw them play a One Beat-centric concert in NYC the night of the huge February 15, 2003 anti-war protest and it was almost like a religious revival.)

Posted by: Becks | Aug 4, 2006 3:05:38 PM

To make up for my enduring "Burn Don't Freeze"-related shame, I can pass on word that the forthcoming debut single from The Diabetes will be entitled, "Code Word Nemesis."

Posted by: Spencer | Aug 4, 2006 3:19:12 PM

For one thing, I think "Oh!" and "O2" are fantastic. Neither "The Remainder" nor "Funeral Song" are all that great qua song (they're not making it onto any of my iTunes playlists) but they're effective change-of-pace songs that make the album work as a whole. "Combat Rock" is, like the very different "Let's Call it Love," part of the essential boldness of the later Sleater-Kinney: they're just putting it out there that they're the new Clash -- the Only Band That Matters -- and living up to the hype.

Posted by: Matthew Yglesias | Aug 4, 2006 4:08:15 PM

I'm second to no one in Clash-worship. They, uh, changed my life 18 years before S-K, on 03/10/80 at the Motor City Roller Rink. http://homepage.mac.com/blackmarketclash/Bands/Clash/recordings/1980/80-03-10%20Detroit/80-03-10%20Detroit.html

And surely they were more important in the grand scheme of things than S-K. And S-K has never even tried to do anything remotely as ambitious as London Caling or Sandinista.

But give S-K these two things:

They would never have done anything so stupid as to claim they're the Only Band That Matters -- because they understand that lots of bands matter, in different ways, to different folks, and that that's a good thing.

And their Combat Rock is (arguably) better. Anyway, their "combat" is less contrived.

Posted by: Marty Lederman | Aug 4, 2006 4:19:35 PM

I have to admit, I got very excited when I drove past Sleater-Kinney exit in Seattle a few months ago :)

Posted by: Emma | Aug 4, 2006 5:24:01 PM

Emma: I think you were in Olympia, not Seattle:

http://www.buzznet.com/tags/roadsigns/photos/?id=1087421

Posted by: Marty Lederman | Aug 4, 2006 6:21:07 PM

Aaaahhhhh, Olympia. It's the Water! Not better than Schmidt's Sports-pack, but not bad, not bad at all.

Posted by: fnook | Aug 5, 2006 1:52:29 AM

"Combat Rock" is, like the very different "Let's Call it Love," part of the essential boldness of the later Sleater-Kinney: they're just putting it out there that they're the new Clash

Wow. As a non-S-K listener, I wasn't aware of this. "Combat Rock"? The only more inane way to make their point would have been to name a song "Cut the Crap."

Posted by: JL | Aug 5, 2006 9:32:52 AM

Another vote for "The Hot Rock" as the high point, although I might have to go with "Little Babies" or "Joey Ramone" as my favorite song. The nice thing about S-K -- and I suspect this is doubly true for Matthew, unless he discovered them late -- is that they've been around long enough and are widely varied enough that it's hard to distinguish between the relative merits of the albums and the place I was at when I was listening to them, which is to say that maybe I would have liked "One Beat" best if I had listened to it every day for two weeks while living in California in my early twenties.

Posted by: Steve | Aug 5, 2006 11:43:36 PM

Neither "The Remainder" nor "Funeral Song" are all that great qua song (they're not making it onto any of my iTunes playlists) but they're effective change-of-pace songs that make the album work as a whole. "Combat Rock" is, like the very different "Let's Call it Love," part of the essential boldness of the later Sleater-Kinney

OK, I listened to One Beat as an album this weekend, instead of just the playlist I have that rearranges some of the songs and removes "Prisstina" and "Hollywood Ending", which I'll admit I haven't done lately. It does work better as an album than I remember but I do think those songs, along with "The Remainder", are kind of weak and, therefore, keep One Beat from attaining the heights of DMO, The Hot Rock, or The Woods. Still better than AHOTBO, although I do like that album better than most people tend to, if only for "Ladyman", "Milkshake", and "Leave You Behind" (and, of course, "You're No Rock 'n Roll Fun").

As far as the "Combat Rock"/"LCIL" comparison, I think what I like so much about LCIL is that it's just so unrestrained and puts everything out there. "Combat Rock" feels like something is holding it back more than their other songs, which I find somewhat frustrating, but I can see how that works with the song's themes about being forced into a box by patriotic expectations. So, I think the song works for what it's trying to accomplish but, aesthetically, it's not one of my favorites.

Posted by: Becks | Aug 6, 2006 10:51:21 PM

OK, your love of One Beat is totally forgiven for this. Awesome.

Posted by: Becks | Aug 7, 2006 3:53:57 PM

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