What should you do – times are rough and the air is charged. The consensus to behave even in arguments has developed deep cracks. There is hatred and bullying instead of thinking and talking. At some point, even those who are patient find it difficult to continue listening to it.
Anger is followed by anger at those who are angry, and this is articulated in language and sound. Which brings us to two albums this week (see also the following page: Green Day), which are loud and full of resentment, but if you listen closer, they are also full of snotty poetry, which is what characterizes good rock and good punk.
Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, who call themselves the band Sleater-Kinney, founded, like many from the Riot Grrrl scene, the club of loud women, 30 years ago in the city of Olympia in the US state of Washington. It’s south of Seattle, where grunge emerged in the years before, a puristic rage rock played on guitar, bass and drums and with lyrics that were sometimes sung and sometimes shouted, mostly by men.
Since their founding, Sleater-Kinney have been the decidedly feminist answer to this: concise, fast-played minimal rock with lyrics that were intended to liberate a society from the “patriarchal drilled ideas” (“Die Zeit”). “Call the Doctor” and “Dig Me Out” were the albums that made Sleater-Kinney, who were still playing as a trio, famous in the 90s. Entertainment Weekly magazine described Corin Tucker as having a “muscular style on the guitar.” But at some point the steam pressure subsided; The band was dormant from 2006 to 2015.
Sleater-Kinney’s eleventh album, “Little Rope”, is now being released. As some critics complain, it no longer has the raw anger of her early records, but rather, in many songs, the thoughtfulness and sadness that people experience when they get older or when, like Carrie Brownstein, they lose their parents in a car accident. This break in life changed and colored the entire album, which they recorded in autumn 2022. The already finished pieces were also revised.
And you can hear that, it’s a strife and a search for meaning that is expressed through songs like “Hell” (“Hell is despair and a young man with a gun”) or “Dress Yourself” (“Put on clothes that you love, for a world you hate”) and give the still decisive guitar playing a second dimension of personal sadness and despair. Like a scream that wants to come out to break free. It is, said New Yorker magazine, the band’s “tenderest album, expressing forgiveness for the person who cannot endure the unbearable. It is an album that understands that it would be just as sensible “Not leaving the house is like forcing yourself to do it.”
You have to listen around in “Little Rope” to sense a sense of fear. Sleater-Kinney mobilize against this mood with their edgy rock songs, encouraging a rebellion of ideas. A comforting energy booster, also in the spirit of the great Diana Ross, who once said: “Instead of looking into the past, I imagine the next twenty years and think about what I need to get there.”
