The last time we heard from Sleater-Kinney on record the band was deep in the dense sonic foliage of The Woods. The intensity of the recording experience with Dave Fridmann left Sleater Kinney mentally and artistically exhausted; within 18 months, Sleater Kinney was no more, its once-impregnable punk rock core fractured.
Ten years later, and Sleater-Kinney is back with a new album, No Cities to Love. This is the Sleater-Kinney of yore, the passage of time barely noticeable save for the maturity of the songwriting and consistency of performance. There’s an angularity of delivery in Price Tag reminiscent of Call the Doctor, replete with rhetorical barbs on the corrupting influence of the contemporary corporate culture. Fangless is Heavens to Betsy meets the Tom Tom Club; Corin Tucker’s shrill vocals interweave with Carrie Brownstein’s razor-edge riffs and Janet Weiss’s rolling syncopated beats. On Surface Envy the personal is political and the music is laced with punk attitude, while No Cities to Love deconstructs the emptiness of the modern urban environment.
A New Wave is a pop song, Sleater-Kinney style: Lena Lovich via The Go Gos; No Anthems stares down the ogre of sub-cultural nostalgia, with its penchant for cheap mythology specious celebration. Gimme Love is a square peg that will never find a round hole to fit into; there’s a hint of Zappa, if Frank morphed into a Portland hipster. Bury Our Friends is the song of a band that’s observed the perils of fame and survived to tell the tale; it’s part scathing critique, and part resilient one-finger salute. Hey Darling is the best song never recorded in LA in 1980 and Fade drifts out into the deep waters of introspection and uncovers the sociological contradictions inherent in the psychology of experience.
Sleater-Kinney is a band with many contemporaries and a truckload of imitators, but few peers, past or present. No Cities to Love is the album Sleater-Kinney could have made at any time in the past; the fact that it’s now confirms Sleater Kinney remains a force to be reckoned with.
BY PATRICK EMERY
