Never mind the Sex Pistols; forget the Ramones. When it comes to punk rock, there never was a better band than Sleater-Kinney1.
Two guitars and a drum set is all it took for three women from the rainy Pacific Northwest to take the world by storm, one killer guitar lick and passionate, no-holds-barred vocal at a time. Before Carrie got famous as one half of the Portlandia team, before Janet did triple time drumming for Bright Eyes, Stephen Malkmus, and Quasi, before Corin had two kids and went solo — before all of that, we were blessed with just over a decade of music from the greatest band you’ve never heard.
It’s true, Sleater-Kinney came from the same riot grrrl roots as groups like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. They held true to the DIY ethos and punk spirit of those groups long after they’d graduated those ranks and made it to the big leagues, but the trio always had too much to say to be tied down to any one movement. They could claim fans among all disciplines — metalheads, punk rockers, indie kids and bearded folksters — and they borrowed from all genres in turn, making for a sound that was peerless then and hasn’t been matched since.
It wasn’t just about sending a message and making noise doing so, though Sleater-Kinney were pretty much unmatched on both those fronts. There was also plenty of tenderness there, a beating heart behind all the steel wool. “One More Hour,” maybe their best track (maybe), is the ultimate breakup anthem sung from both sides at once, hinting at a brief romance between singer Corin Tucker and guitarist Carrie Brownstein.
Tucker’s impassioned vocal delivery, one of the band’s signatures (that voice!), kept their approach unique in its raw emotionality, and Brownstein and Weiss’ uncommon rhythm section never let up once.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the band never overstayed its welcome. That Sleater-Kinney’s career was short and sweet only adds to their legend; it’s no hyperbole to say they never made a bad record. Seriously. Trying to argue over their best LP with a fellow fan is next to impossible — I mean, how do you choose between the gnawing punk of Dig Me Out and the savage Bush-era indictment of One Beat? What about the messy pre-Weiss assault of Call the Doctor, or that noisy behemoth of an epilogue, The Woods?
In flagrant disobedience of the punk rock rulebook, Sleater-Kinney’s sound only got louder and more immediate with each record — all of their records are great, but none are laid so bare as their final one, and the career-ending tour that accompanied The Woods is still the zenith of Sleater-Kinney’s already astronomical achievements. This is a group that went out on top, unwilling to see themselves fall into anything close to obscurity or mediocrity.
Maybe that’s why their music still hits so hard today. Listening to these records now — and surely again, once Sub Pop re-releases them in the recently-announced remasters due in early October — the aural assaults packed into every vinyl groove are still felt as palpably as they were a decade ago or more. Some bands live on trying to recapture their glory days, and others fizzle out before they’re really able to make a mark.
Very seldom has a band like Sleater-Kinney come around, and for them to have left us such a wealth of amazing, pulse-pounding, fucking life-affirming music is only a testament to how well they still deliver, almost 10 years after their untimely demise.
1 Okay, except for maybe The Clash. But they shouldn’t count, anyway.
