Sleater-Kinney has made sure that its first tour since the band dissolved in 2006 is a resumption, not merely a reunion. At Terminal 5 in New York on Thursday night, opening a sold-out two-night stand, there wasn’t a hint of self-congratulation or nostalgia: just the same joyfully adamant spirit, odd-angled indie-rock, headlong momentum, banshee intensity and sense of purpose. The three-woman band — Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein on lead vocals and guitars, Janet Weiss on drums and backup vocals — was still thinking as hard as it was slamming out its songs.
From its debut album in 1995, Sleater-Kinney was always a bundle of idealistic ambitions. Those grew out of the punk-rock feminism of the riot-grrrl movement and, more privately, the distinctive musical partnership of Ms. Tucker and Ms. Brownstein, with their wrangling, jittery, endlessly fertile guitar tandems and lyrics that addressed the personal and the sociopolitical in forthright but never simplistic ways. Ms. Weiss, who took over the drums on the band’s 1997 album “Dig Me Out,” both drove the band harder and brought out its quirks.
Before making its public reappearance this year, Sleater-Kinney wrote and recorded a new album, “No Cities to Love” (Sub Pop): a matter of both artistic determination, to say something immediate, and of conscience, so as not to be an oldies act. At Terminal 5, the band played nearly all of the newer songs, along with older material that had some audience members shouting their recognition within the first notes of a guitar riff.
The new songs are as gnarled and brazen as the rest of Sleater-Kinney’s catalog. They also reflect how 10 years have passed between Sleater-Kinney albums, as lyrics take on current economic insecurities (“Bury Our Friends” declares, “We live on dread in our own gilded age”) and ponder the band’s own future. “No one here is taking notice/No outline will ever hold us,” the band vows in “A New Wave.” During Sleater-Kinney’s absence, Ms. Brownstein found a new audience as a writer and star in the comedy series “Portlandia,” but Sleater-Kinney doesn’t play for laughs.
Onstage, the band was all sinew and heart. Ms. Tucker’s voice wailed and broke as the music demanded.The tempos in songs like “Words and Guitar” and “A New Wave” raced, gathered themselves and raced again, the way people in a team get excited. Sleater-Kinney’s songs know their influences, from the girl-group harmonies of “Oh!” to the minimalist cycles of “One Beat” to power-trio frenzy (with Ms. Tucker using her guitar like a bass while Ms. Brownstein wailed lead lines). But no matter where it drew from, Sleater-Kinney pushed further. “Entertain,” from the 2005 album “The Woods,” was one ambivalent manifesto: “We’re not here ’cause we want to entertain/ Go away, don’t go away.”
A guest musician, Katie Harkin, appeared intermittently to add a keyboard line or a guitar part. She freed Ms. Tucker to leave her guitar behind and be a complete singer and frontwoman: wailing, flipping her hair, claiming the stage. “Gimme respect! Gimme equality! Gimme love!” Ms. Tucker demanded on the way to introducing her own “Gimme Love.” Sleater-Kinney was a band awash in self-consciousness, fully aware of who it has been and who it is now, ready to make every wail and twin-guitar line and backbeat register with fans — and also to advance its story.
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