Sleater-Kinney - Rock's Free Couple

Anyone could have noticed the cocky - and therefore thinly veiled - shyness with which Sam Coomes, when asked about the secret ingredient of Almost, answered without hesitation: "Janet Weiss", when we met them in Bologna. It's this simplicity, despite a monumental career now spanning three decades, that perhaps makes their experience unique - a story of total, unconditional devotion to music, of an active and selfless contribution to that impressive array of musical expressions that make the Portland, Oregon area one of the most fertile in the country.

A passion that still drives them today to set sail into the unknown, not always with the hope - if not of winning over a few new fans - of still meeting the faithful but sparse faces of their longtime followers. In every band they've been part of, loyalty to certain standards of independent distribution has, in fact, never wavered, even though the sirens of a "heartier" commercial success have made themselves heard on more than one occasion.

Janet's fiery charisma met Sam's hallucinated, histrionic visionary streak back in '90, and from that day their partnership - not just musical, the two are ex-spouses - has never been broken. There would be countless stories to tell, of bands they founded and then dissolved (or lovingly set aside), of an impressive body of collaborations by one or the other (Built To Spill, Go-Betweens, Elliott Smith, Bright Eyes, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks).

We've chosen the most significant ones: the start of Coomes' career in Donner Party, the unforgettable, sublime standard-bearers of American jangle-pop, active between 1986 and 1989; the subsequent (1993) and still ongoing union in Almost; and finally Weiss's contribution to the riot grrrl movement as a key member of Sleater-Kinney.

DONNER PARTY

When, around 1983, he chose the moniker for his first band, Coomes had in mind a tragic news event from 1846. Led by the Donner family, a group of American pioneers seeking their fortune pushed westward. During the long and tormented journey, some of them ended up getting lost in the ice, reduced to cannibalism just to survive...

Aided by Melanie Clarin (drums and accordion) and Reinhold Johnson (bass), Coomes (splitting duties between guitars, violin and banjo) struck a deal with New York's Cryptovision Records for the release of their first, self-titled work, Donner Party. Granted, the music doesn't reflect the dramatic legacy hidden within the folds of their name, yet a certain degree of irony applied to themes of death and pain is evident in their music. Between jangle-pop and folk revival, the San Francisco band's trajectory sets off, almost naturally, from the crystalline sound of the Byrds, even though Coomes and his cohorts bring an entirely new frenzy ("Before Too Long"), the offspring of the small, silent "revolutions" of those years - the kind that, for instance, lead to the temple of Camper Van Beethoven on the romping country-western notes of "Halo" and "Spiders", or the kind that, bristling and solemn, inspire cooldown instrumentals like "That That Is, Is", "Are You in Tune With Yourself?" (hazy and steeped in "free" moods), "Surfin' to the Moon" (this last one close to the surf infatuations of Canada's Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet) and "G-l-o-r-i-a". Alongside the propulsive liaisons with punk via Dinosaur Jr. on "Godlike Porpoise Head of Blue-Eyed Mary", "John Wilkes Booth" and "The Ghost", more intimate moments peek through, like the rustic vignette of "When You Die Your Eyes Pop Out", and the frontier painted with distracted romanticism of "The Owl of Minerva" and "Oh Esmeralda". A lively and never dull record, still full of charm years later.

A year goes by and it's still the Byrds setting the pace on "Why Bother", the opening track of their second work, again self-titled but this time released by Pitch-A-Tent. Still in line with the "contemporary" ferment of the time, even though their gaze remains fixed on the past, Donner Party further widen their scope. They thus venture into the world of Hüsker Dü, showing they've tasted and digested the power-pop vertigo of "Warehouse: Songs And Stories" ("Sickness"); they play with vocal interlocking on "Mrs. Miserack", winking at the beach-punk of X; they chisel out numbers poised between psychedelia and flashes of hard-blues ("Treepig", "Blue Starch Acid for Baby's New Tooth"), while the dreamy whistling of the indolent "What a Gush Of Matter Into Life Is Here" invites, once again, calm resignation in the face of the inevitability of the end...

A seemingly carefree sound, almost with its head in the clouds ("Would You Like to Have Something To Eat?", "Lost In Hoboken", the dreamy "Please Don't Listen" and "When I Was A Baby", almost a tribute to the more fairy-tale-like Sixties), yet capable of stinging just right when needed. And even visionary, as the upward flight of "Unfriendly" and the lysergic coda of "Friendly" are keen to point out. In the end, with "Dansen Går På Svennsta Skär", everyone winds up in the middle of a thoroughly drunken Nordic festival, singing along together, hoping to ensnare, if only for a few hours, the unsettling shadow of the dark lady...

A third album would never be officially released, but it would find a home in Innerstate's definitive anthology, Complete Recordings 1987-1989, which also offers up a handful of live recordings. The tracks from the "ghost" album show a band growing ever more mature and also ready to play the card of more extreme experimentation ("Chocolate Shake", for instance, seems to wink at Ant-Bee's "parallel" universe). Amid swarms of feedback cradling their remake of the classic "Goodnight Irene", the hardelic pulses of "King Chico", the emotional ups and downs of "Everyone Is A Girl", the usual instrumental excursions ("Notker The Stammerer", "Kore Cosmu", "Nutty Botty"), the brazen boogie of "We Cannot Be Happy" and the feverish electricity of "Birthday Suit", Coomes and co. bring to life another precious collection.

QUASI

A band born with side-project intentions that has survived in its own alternative niche for nearly two decades, earning in the field its stripes as a veteran and much-respected outfit, remains a rather unusual phenomenon even in the picaresque microcosm of independent labels. The stubborn indifference to trends and shortcuts to success, which they've always flaunted as the crucial piece of their identity, is nevertheless not enough on its own to explain why Almost so quickly became a cult band, in the United States and across half of Europe.

To better understand the reasons behind this limited but lasting fortune among fans of the ever-fertile alternative rock underground, we need to go back a few decades and properly highlight what, right from the start, proved to be the distinguishing traits of the duo (now a trio) based in Portland, Oregon.

Two Hearts, One Band

In 1993 the "two hearts, one band" formula was hardly in vogue. The echo of similar outfits from Britain's rich indie-pop scene a few years earlier was too faint (despite Cobain's infatuation with the Vaselines) to convince emerging artists to replicate their appeal in new settings, and far too ahead of the trend-setters' schedule to already become a standard back then – the kind that today, from the Kills to the Raveonettes, from the Fiery Furnaces to Crystal Castles, still leaves a faint whiff of not-entirely-genuine hype.

When Sam Coomes decided to launch his own "conjugal" band, Jack White had not yet met Meg White, and Mates Of State in San Francisco and Viva Voce in Portland were still a long way from being conceived. Sam and Janet Weiss, however, had already been married for some time and were playing in a band called Motorgoat, even though both of those experiences were on borrowed time. Bassist Brad Pedinov's departure led the two to bring down the curtain on that obscure project, which had only a single seven-inch to its name, and Almost was born as an entirely new entity, for purely sentimental reasons.

For Sam, it was also a chance to take center stage in a personal creative workshop, during breaks from his increasingly demanding touring commitments with Heatmiser, the band fronted by his close friend Elliott Smith (which he would join permanently in 1994). While the marriage was falling apart, the artistic chemistry with his partner proved immediately brilliant, even if the results remained quite scarce: after the release of a scrappy split single with fellow townsfolk Bugskull, Almost disappeared from view until 1996, a genuine turning point for the duo: Sam played an active role in Heatmiser's masterpiece, "Mic City Sons", Janet became the new drummer for Sleater-Kinney, and the tiny Key-Op Records released a collection of tracks the couple had recorded in amateurish fashion over the previous two years, unimaginatively titled Early Recordings.

This collection of crooked, jagged sketches, effectively the first true Almost album, comes across as an uneven work in progress of moods and influences, marked by a fundamental uncertainty: the sound is still bare-bones, the melodies unadorned, the production fragmentary and loaded with electric grime and reverb, in a shape that's as raw as it is muscular. There's no shortage of timid forays into still-naive pop territory ("Homunculus", "Two Hounds"), but what prevails are the angrier episodes, a faithful snapshot of the couple's emotional turbulence during their divorce years.

It's jagged rock, all sinew and nerve, which at its best unfolds into an honest, straightforward garage-rock gallop ("Pay Me Now, or Pay Me Later") or into a slower, more tormented flow of swirling, grumbling guitars ("Unspeakable Thing"). Some of the guiding lines of Almost's music are only sketched out here, out of focus because they're expressed contradictorily, without a clear direction: still torn between melody and noisy drift, the Portland duo leave behind just a few small, graceless traces ("Mammon", "Gaping Holes") of what would soon become a readily recognizable style – raw intuitions awaiting a more fruitful formal codification.

Early Recordings is a fine training ground for the band's sound (especially for Weiss), and the results aren't long in coming: having luckily landed a deal with Up (the label of Built To Spill and Modest Mouse) and with the alibi of their romantic partnership now gone, the band's engine paradoxically began running at full throttle. Within just three years, Almost would prove capable of releasing, in rapid succession, three albums of dazzling creativity – in the eyes of many, the best in their discography – building a solid reputation as a pyrotechnic live phenomenon and establishing themselves among the leading lights of that "fabulous sound of the Pacific Northwest", aptly celebrated by the Village Voice.

Produced by Charlie Campbell, leader of fellow Portlanders Pond, R&B Transmogrification is, in every sense, the breakthrough record. Despite a few lingering traces of insecurity and fragility, the key hallmarks of an already highly personal style come into sufficiently sharp focus. Songs like "Ghost Dreaming" and "Ballad Of Mechanical Man" are an early triumph of Coomes-isms, with falsetto verses, extremely sweet single-voice choruses and lively uptempo architectures, but even the more melancholic or acidic passages show a high degree of signature style.

Critics welcomed them, labelling them a successful cross between the Doors and Pavement-style indie rock, though it's beyond doubt that the couple's points of reference ranged far more widely, from acknowledged idols the Beatles and the Who to stars of the piano-pop firmament like Van Dyke Parks and Rod Argent of the Zombies. Among the influences, one shouldn't forget Sam's apprenticeship in an outfit that was, in effect, well ahead of its time: Donner Party, brilliant at blending, in a wholly original way, schizoid garage-pop, coarse-grained psychedelia, country flavors, Captain Beefheart-style warped blues, and Paisley Underground residue – all ingredients given a healthy recycling in this new project.

Coomes's Rocksichord, a sort of hybrid keyboard souped up with various distortion effects, stands as the record's absolute protagonist (and of the early Almost style) like a magic box the musician exploits in an extreme variety of ways, from the martial, dark melody of "When I'm Dead" to the electric verve of numerous tracks, from the looming tones of the title track (largely echoed years later on The Sword of God) to the hazy indeterminacy of "Clouds", an early bet on his gift for crafting atmospheres.

Almost's strength, however, lies above all in the union of these two musical sensibilities and their respective signature instruments: an already perfectly honed blend capable of translating into an unmistakable sonic signature – skeletal, charging and gentle at once – not lacking the occasional injection of healthy rock hysteria (the emblematic "Sugar") that keeps the record from settling into the routine of a lopsided psych-pop.

In such a stimulating creative framework, the lyrics too are given no secondary role. If, in the very earliest songs, Coomes had already made use of a genuine bestiary to amplify figurative implications, R&B Transmogrification draws on that same approach in a more playful key and extends it to a potentially endless imaginative world tied to childhood memories and the theme of death (another Donner Party legacy), with results that are quite enjoyably macabre and grotesque ("My Coffin").

The Many Shades of Almost

What we might call, with a rather too convenient play on words, the band's Up period reaches its most thrilling outcome over the following two years. In April 1998, Featuring 'Birds' was released, the first Almost work to be distributed in Europe as well, via Domino.

Thanks to the valuable contribution of numerous friends (including Elliott Smith and his then-partner Joanna Bolme), as well as access to a proper studio with a sixteen-track recording setup, the sound turns out fuller and rounder than on their earlier efforts, and the Portland duo manage to strike a miraculous balance between incisiveness and lightheartedness, realist bite and imagination.

Alongside the now-classic stripped-down ballads, room begins to open up for intimate acoustic vignettes ("Please Do") or more markedly power pop episodes ("The Happy Prole", "California"), foreshadowing an approach that would prove triumphant on the following two albums. The sonic backbone, however, remains largely tied to the raw, explosive electric vitality of an ever-overdriven rocksichord, kept in check in its euphoric surges by Weiss's dry, primal drumming.

Openly rock moments are fewer than in the past, though a furious, visceral nihilistic stomp like "Nothing From Nothing" is the kind that leaves a mark. What feels most truly on point, more than anything else, are Coomes's words, fitted perfectly into the songs and disarming in their honesty and sharpness of vision. Moving effortlessly between nostalgic melancholy and the rough verve of a rock prophet, Sam becomes the passionate bard of a generation of losers in a world with no prospects, where not even Walt Disney can bring back a smile.

The drudgery of everyday life, the frenzy of conformity and chronic unhappiness are the main themes of an album that, with delightful irony and not a trace of cynicism, also gives us a series of flawless self-portraits ("You Fucked Yourself", "I Give Up", the heartbreaking "It's Hard To Turn Me On"), written by Coomes in his own hopeless idiom.

"Only Success Can Fail Me Now", goes the closing track's title, the most emblematic statement of this upside-down philosophy, with the author already taking shelter in his candid mythology of fairy-tale monsters ("Sea Shanty", a gorgeous track), drowning sweetness in noise and duly celebrating his own disillusionment. Intimate and desperate, Featuring 'Birds' remains an unforgettable chapter in Almost's discography for the bitter, artifice-free aftertaste its songs leave behind, with no self-satisfaction whatsoever.

After an exhausting world tour, much of it spent opening for Elliott Smith, Sam and Janet were back in the studio in Portland to deliver a quick follow-up to their well-received third album. Smith himself plays bass on a handful of tracks, while Larry Crane — later a trusted collaborator of Spinanes, Decemberists, M.Ward and Richmond Fontaine — sits behind the console for the second time.

Field Studies hit the shops in September 1999, holding more than one surprise for fans, starting with a more polished, decidedly less raw production than before. The rough, wild edges that defined Featuring 'Birds' are softened (and partly defused) thanks to a sudden, twofold shift in perspective.

Between the lines, an irresistible surreal streak emerges that doesn't make listeners miss the old songs' caustic bent, and in fact manages to amplify their suggestive power by digging deeper into allegory: the eccentric Sam keeps drawing freely from a boundless repertoire of archetypes and childhood fears, adding new figures to his own collection of metaphorical casts of contemporary anxieties.

Lightness seems to be the overriding semantic value chosen as the seal for the whole record, and ultimately the quality doesn't suffer for it: "A Fable With No Moral" makes that abundantly clear. As mentioned, Field Studies pushes to its furthest extreme that shift toward easy listening that was only hinted at timidly on the previous LP, though it would be a mistake to claim the band's identity comes out somehow distorted by the gentler turns of their new musical guise.

Driven by Sam's flair, the rocksichord tints one song after another with contagious pastel shades, from the aestheticizing (and at times overblown) "The Golden Egg" to the carefree "The Skeleton", a genuine piece of sonic sleight-of-hand crafted with exquisite pop skill. Even so, Almost prove they know what they're doing, and Janet seems more eager than ever to make herself heard, whether as a graceful backing voice or by carving out a lead role for herself ("Two By Two"), all without ever skimping on rhythmic substance.

They don't hold back from landing a few trademark jabs of their own ("All The Same", "Empty Words"), with the cynicism always neatly hidden in the lyrics, nor do they deny themselves at least a couple of delightful rock detours (the melodic crashes of the feisty "Birds" are a real treat).

All things considered, they gain a bit more self-awareness, and the album proves thoroughly enjoyable, despite a slight dip in the second half, with sketches that are less inspired but undeniably in keeping with the record's multicolored spirit. Proof that this is the lightest-toned of all Almost's releases can be found in the trio of songs that closes the album on a note of unusual optimism: a strange anomaly given what would follow soon after, a radiant snapshot in the duo's career, capable of casting a spell even if it lasted only l'espace d'un matin.

Against the White Devil

After two albums so blistering and surprising, following them up is no easy task. The Portland duo, however, seem entirely unfazed by the pressure of inevitable comparisons and throw themselves enthusiastically into a new challenge, despite Janet's increasingly demanding commitments to her main project, Sleater-Kinney.

Signing a brand-new deal with the legendary Touch & Go seems like the perfect springboard for adding another piece to an already rich mosaic, and the duo wastes no time. The Sword Of God comes out in August 2001, self-produced by the band with the help of their trusted Larry Crane.

Once again the result is disorienting, even if the general outlines of the Almost sound remain substantially intact. Coomes and Weiss opt for a curious form of estrangement, replicating their own musical trademarks in less graceful territory and adopting far darker tones than in the recent past.

As the relentless, gloomy “Seal The Deal” demonstrates, a fitting representative of the album, the melodies have grown heavier, Sam's keyboards are dark and charged, and Janet's drumming is an inexorable hammer. On the tenacious ballad “Fuck Hollywood” shards of the old nihilism return with force within a sufficiently leaden framework – thanks in part to the sax of Stanley Zappa, nephew of Frank – while the lyrics too, in more than one instance, betray a sense of well-founded despair (the emblematic “A Case of No Way Out”).

Almost make no secret of having returned as incurable pessimists: their open critique of certain excesses of modernity, a kind of connecting thread and key theme of the record, is developed with a sincerity that commands admiration. The Sword Of God is a controversial, uneven work, weighed down by its own inconsistencies and at times genuinely convoluted. The juxtaposition of details that don't always cohere, often applied unconsciously, confuses the listener's bearings but ultimately also accounts for the undeniable charm of a happily unbalanced, difficult album that seems to thrive on contradiction: it closes with an exuberant parody-tribute to rock'n'roll, just enough to dissolve into farce the tension built up along the way, and it insists on hiding fragments of extreme tenderness inside almost impenetrable sonic shells.

Although the overall tone remains austere and menacing, and although the band plays with unheard-of ferocity for long stretches, there's no shortage of tracks that run clearly against that grain, and they rank among the most remarkable in its discography. Impossible not to mention the rough tenderness of “Better Luck Next Time”, the enchanted wonder of “Nothing, Nowhere” (perhaps Weiss's finest song ever) or the Beatles-esque easy listening of “It's Raining”, a track so populistically well-built that it hits the mark on the very first try.

That Almost are shedding their skin seems like a given, and once again confirmation isn't long in coming. In the two years leading up to Hot Shit!, the band's sixth LP, Sam and Janet are especially active as guests on other people's records too: after playing drums on the debut of fellow Portlander Sarah Dougher, Weiss appears in the credits of Unwound's last album before their breakup, Coomes renews his collaboration with Built To Spill, and both return the old favor to Charlie Campbell by playing with him in his new project Goldcard, much as they had done in 2000 with their standout contribution to the well-received “The Friend Of Rachel Worth” by the Go-Betweens.

If the pair's proverbial outgoingness and availability seem borne out by this growing number of outward collaborations, their work together as a duo carries on unflinchingly along the path begun with The Sword Of God, and the room left for optimism looks ever slimmer. Sam, in particular, shows he's suffering under the reactionary climate felt at every level in the United States with the Republicans in power, but it's precisely from this context that he draws the right fuel to mount a sharp, wide-ranging critical response.

Hot Shit! sees the light of day in September 2003 and makes clear from the very first notes that it has few pop flourishes in store for longtime fans. Strategically placed at the opening, introduced by a thoroughly sinister organ, the title track is a ruthless, unvarnished calling card, steeped in an autistic, dense and obsessive indie-rock that perfectly defines the album's acidic character. Even more than its predecessor, this is a record with a clear expressionist bent, one that could be called unsettling precisely for its tendency to sharpen the interplay of contrasts already mentioned, favoring an underlying contradictoriness that offers no easy points of reference.

Certainly the sound has become more tangible, and Weiss's substantial drumming, with its powerful rhythmic presence, proves extremely effective in this light. It's a work that cultivates a more conventional rock-blues attitude (“Good Time Rock'n'roll”, “Mama Tried”), charging it with hefty doses of healthy, ragged hysteria and swapping out keyboards for anguished guitars à la George Harrison: it's the right device for masking their own bitter disappointment and confronting head-on the horrors of a disconcerting present, in the most sincere and visceral way possible.

The subject is the Iraq war, with an attack initially kept on the level of allusion (“Master & Dog”, “Seven Years Gone”) and then unleashed in full force in the litany of curses that closes the fierce “White Devil's Dream”, calling out by name and surname every heavyweight of the Bush administration.

If these are the general outlines of an album that has nothing politically correct about it, there's no denying that Almost can still cast a spell when they choose to retreat into territory more suited to their decadent nature: it happens with the falsetto of the mournful “No One”, with the twilight self-portrait of “Drunken Tears”, a rare digression into indulgent tenderness, as well as in the pleasant return to childhood evoked by the utterly delicate nursery rhyme “Lullaby pt.2”, perfect for capturing the gentler, less wrecked side of Coomes's soul.

When things turn dark…

2003 closes with the terrible news of Elliott Smith's (alleged) suicide. While Janet is increasingly caught up in a genuine touring-and-studio tour de force with Sleater-Kinney, after the release of the second Blues Goblins record, Sam and Almost all but vanish from view. The blow is too hard to take, the loss of a close friend too heavy to bear.

Coomes only starts writing songs again after several months, and it will take more than two and a half years to arrive at a new album. Released in March 2006, When The Going Gets Dark is a work with a more-than-eloquent mission, as the title itself suggests. “Alice The Goon” is a fittingly ferocious opener that reveals the band's new sonic approach, essentially a radical intensification of the already harsh tones of the two previous records: an oppressive blend of unease and jittery sounds, with looming guitars and a free-leaning piano brought in to decisively strip away the nuances in the Portland duo's style.

Tracks like “The Rhino” or “Merry X-mas” heighten the sense of angry restlessness and that tendency toward improvisation which seems to be the most notable new element in the band's approach, despite Dave Fridmann's production work. Compared to the past there's a lot more unpredictability, and the over-the-top performance of a Luciferian, mature and hallucinated Sam plays a decisive role in that regard. Coomes leans more than once on gritty, bloody blues inflections, a clear legacy of the vibrant reinterpretations of obscure classics (from Howlin' Wolf to Elmore James and John Lee Hooker) carried out under the Blues Goblins moniker: besides the aforementioned “The Rhino”, special mention goes to the powerful “Death Culture Blues” and the gentler “Poverty Sucks”.

Without the crackling, vividly colourful pop exuberance of the past, and with the electricity of the guitars often turning obsessive and irritable, feelings of alienation, disorientation and despondency prevail, tending to resurface even where one might expect a different outcome (see the hymn to contemporary illusions that is "Beyond The Sky", the bleak closing track of the more hopeful "Peace And Love").

To ease the grip of this vicious circle, Sam often resorts in his lyrics to curious nonsense-like, surreal streaks that lend the songs a fine metaphorical depth. While the title track effectively confirms the brutality of the project, the Californian singer proves capable of giving it real breadth, a sense of epic scope that lends weight to the boundless desolation of the words and is renewed as a glimmer of hope in the visionary finale of "Invisible Star".

To coincide with the promotional tour for When The Going Gets Dark, a mini-album titled Almost Self Boot 93-96 was sold, containing a handful of tracks dating back to the band's early recording sessions (including covers of Bowie, Bolan and Prince) plus the track the duo had contributed to the split with Bugskull twelve years earlier: on the whole, a release that's far from essential, replicating that more experimental sound built on raw rock junk immune to any formal logic, yet interesting as a further document of Almost's hazy beginnings and for certain curious correspondences with the newly abrasive sound of their most recent work.

That same year saw the end of the Sleater-Kinney adventure, but Janet Weiss surprisingly stepped up her live activity: she began a lasting collaboration with Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst, then became a permanent member of the Jicks, Stephen Malkmus's new band.

It was precisely the Jicks' bassist, Elliott Smith's ex-girlfriend Joanna Bolme, who played regularly with Sam and Janet during the American tour, and just a year later her entry into the band as a full, permanent member was announced. After fourteen years, Almost ceased to be a two-person affair. The process of redefining the group's internal dynamics brought with it considerable enthusiasm and fresh stimuli.

In June 2009, already with several new songs in hand, the Portland trio broke free from a now drastically downsized Touch & Go and signed with Kill Rock Stars. The new album, American Gong, arrived in stores just seven months later, confirming the trend of lucid disillusionment running through all their recent work.

The persistence with which Coomes sticks to this expressive register and its tart tonalities, combined with an undeniable physiological dip in inspiration (evident in the reliance on one filler track too many), makes American Gong an uneven and, on more than one occasion, predictable album. Even so, there's no shortage of positive moments here, first and foremost that lion's pride the band displays with admirable ferocity at its peaks. While the rocksichord is increasingly a fleeting memory of the band's pop past, Bolme's bass playing proves absolutely decisive in this deliberate sonic metamorphosis and recalibration.

The neurotic one-two punch that opens the album is more than eloquent: first the martial advance of the foaming electric guitars on "Repulsion", a thoroughly brutal, unsentimental rock track, then the headlong rush towards the abyss of "Little White Horse", an angular, indifferent, guitar-driven song, with Weiss's engine roaring at full throttle.

Tracks like "Bye Bye Blackbird" and "Rockabilly Party" follow a similar script, though here the underlying unease is brilliantly disguised at times by the sugar-coating of certain passages (the sunny punk-pop melodies of the former, lifted from Tripping Daisy's "I'm An Elastic Firecracker") and at others by that touch of surreal irony that broadens the emotional spectrum, saving the Portland trio from a hardening into cynicism and irreversible despair.

Elsewhere the songwriting proves more formulaic, the execution less effective, and the album tends to fold in on itself a little, weighed down by a decadent melancholy made of clichés that aren't unpleasant but are inevitably familiar by now: songs like "Death Is Not The End" or "Everything & Nothing At All" aren't without charm, but they betray a certain weariness in rehashing automatisms that have remained unchanged for the past fifteen years: pills of faded romanticism, dispensed by a Sam Coomes who seems lost with his falsetto in the midst of a black vortex, abandoned in utter solitude among his own shadows.

These weaknesses turn into caricature on the (objectively) poor "Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler", leaving an impression of mannerism that's all the more irritating given that producers of the calibre of Dave Fridmann, Steve Fisk and Tucker Martine worked on it.

Still, a sour note or an interlocutory work - moreover within an understandable period of restructuring - aren't enough to dent the merits of a band as consistently transparent, dispassionate, inventive and unique as Almost. And indeed, they're soon back on fine form. The US indie-rock veterans celebrate their twentieth anniversary with a double album that works like an eraser wiped across the blackboard of their most recent output, an enthusiastic restart free of any performance anxiety whatsoever. It's no coincidence that this is also the record with which the Portland outfit returns to being an exclusive two-person affair, following the amicable split from the listless Joanna Bolme (who had played bass on the previous American Gong and on a couple of tours): a substantial slimming-down of the line-up, matched by the greater fluidity of songwriting stripped of all excess. It takes just a few minutes - the debris and the awful distortions that meet Janet's pots and pans on the nursery-rhyme "You Can Stay But You Gotta Go" - to confirm that Mole City wanted to bring back the group in its roughest, most makeshift dimension, a vinegary, playground kind of rock that does justice to their raw, carefree nature, resistant to any kind of overstructuring. Here it's the imperfections, the vocal cracks, the gravelly dirt of the guitars and the boozy brio of the keyboards that make the difference, where you might stumble upon the typical melodic, skipping track à la Field Studies, cooked up though according to the crooked, brutal, slapdash recipe of Hot Shit!.

A return to the wild for the duo, laid out in trotting, at times embryonic vignettes, which becomes emblematic on "Fat Fanny Land" in the lovely fusion of his unhinged (and almost single-note) roxychord with her primitivist drumming. Little more than a sketch, about as unsophisticated as can be imagined, taking things straight back to their origins, the rambling tableaux of their first collection (Early Recordings). Blissfully tangled, tipsy, rowdy, graceless and full of life: this is Almost in pursuit of a (possible) second youth, and perhaps this is the only credible way out of the cul-de-sac of gloom, pessimism and greyness they seemed to have gotten themselves into.

The goat ("The Goat") then becomes the symbol of a renewed intimate bestiary, where the rhinoceros of When The Going Gets Dark had represented a sort of emotional nadir. It's a considerable step back from the mighty muscular outbursts or the pop juggling of times past, but it's the result of a strongly deliberate expressive choice - the reprisal of their primal insanity, the ground zero of their music and style - which may seem less than courageous and may raise eyebrows, but it deserves respect.

Amid this climate of oddball euphoria, there's also no shortage of more lunar, introverted episodes. "Chumps of Chance" is exemplary in this sense, with Sam in absolute darkness, alongside the reverberated echoes of his keyboard, delivering a melancholy soliloquy that casts an atmospheric shadow of pure unease, without dismantling the foundations of his oddball poetics. Not to mention "R.I.P.", the classic ecstatic, melancholy track (entrusted to Weiss's voice) that the two Americans have never failed to offer up, or the obsessions of "Headshrinker", a looming theatre of the absurd in which Coomes sings like a perfect outsider in his own separate world, with not the slightest intention of coming out of it.

After the boundless disenchantment, a new phase of enchantments opens up for Almost, however fragile and irreducible to the comfort of convention or good form. In the second half the album indulges those intentions and literally goes haywire, curdling like mayonnaise. Bursts of burnt romanticism and drunk-but-proud voice-and-piano passages alternate (and multiply) with tears, ugliness, noisy offal, synthetic gurgles straight out of a 60s sci-fi B-movie, autistic fragments and lysergic scrawls, simulating a logic that irremediably goes to hell.

Still illuminating is the prize package that ties an obscure spoken word passage to a saccharine refrain for the sheer pleasure of throwing you off balance ("Ice Cube in the Sun"), as are the seventies evocations and the psychedelic brochure of the song that closes proceedings ("New Western Way") before the pitch-black mist of the finale, marrying grotesque Who to Pink Floyd guitars and opening the sky to one last flight of liberating madness. Tracks like these, in the band's past, would sometimes betray just a hint of mannered decadence. On Mole City, however, that twilight streak isn't mediated by any artifice, nor driven by crowd-pleasing design. It's simply a faithful snapshot of today's Almost in their irreducible purity.

And speaking of current affairs, it's curious to read around about Bugger Me as if it were the solo debut of Sam Coomes, already the mastermind behind veteran outfit Almost and various minor projects, close friend of the late Elliott Smith and a top-tier session player for Built To Spill and Heatmiser. It's curious because technically his solo debut dates back some fifteen years, to the lopsided animations and psychedelicized classic blues of his ill-fated alias Blues Goblins. On closer inspection, not even the eccentric collage the Californian artist devised and placed on the cover can be considered brand new - at its center the star of the celebrated "Phantom of the Opera" directed by Rupert Julian in 1925 - since it broadly echoes the one chosen a few years back for a t-shirt design for his two-piece band with Janet Weiss. While his best creations (the triptych "R&B Transmogrification" / "Featuring Birds" / "Field Studies") have just been reissued thanks to a commendable initiative by Sub Pop, our man has hardly been sitting idle in the three years since his last sighting: he's dabbled as a producer for Hungry Ghost, the new band led by drummer Sara Lund (Unwound, Corin Tucker Band), and has set up yet another oddball outfit, Deep Fried Boogie Band, shared among others with former Guided By Voices member Chris Slusarenko (previously a bandmate in the Takeovers), whose debut full-length is expected by the end of this year.

With pointed irony, the press release sketches a quick stylistic portrait of the album by invoking "Suicide meet the Beach Boys", only to clarify that the reference isn't to the sophisticated authors of "Pet Sounds" but rather to their far scrappier cousins of "Surfer Girl" and the like. To sweeten the deal further, there are nods to the dusty names of mustier one-hit wonders like Chris Montez and Timmy Thomas, though these should be taken with a grain of salt. The cast is reduced to just the American himself, the black and white keys of his little totemic beast, and "Conny", a non-programmable rhythm box from the mid-sixties. The album opens with the spoiled rumba of "Stride On". Rubbery pulses accompany the swaying spell of the rocksichord and Coomes's slightly damaged, charmingly dazed innocence. This time around he's a bit like the Phantom of the Stage from Brian De Palma, shut away in the solitude of an ideal underground lair writing his withered but, in their own way, enchanting elegies, with formidable immediacy and a heart that, having forgotten certain mannered pages of the past, has started bleeding again like in its best days. "Cruisin' Thru" dusts off the vinegary romanticism of certain passages on "Hot Shit!", the joyously gloomy record that perhaps most closely echoes these new, narcotic and twilit abstractions.

"Tough Times in Plastic Land" breathes a pleasant laboratory atmosphere. Ramshackle, gurgling, scary and dusty, as if it could belong to a child's imagination, yet inhabited by a creative genius who is erratic out of necessity, and therefore lovable even in all its ugliness. The grotesque, in Sam Coomes's particular declination, finds in this collection a refinement and at the same time a completeness only hinted at elsewhere. "Everybody Loves A War" makes clear how his teetering, wretched and sublime weirdness has what it takes to soften or move the few listeners willing to indulge it, with its bizarre evocations drawn from a cinematic imagination that by now amounts to pure mythology: horror films with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi above all, but without neglecting the threadbare sci-fi of countless forgotten B-movies and, more rarely, landmark ones too (the segment "Just Like The Rest" conceals a none-too-subtle homage to the Vangelis of "Blade Runner"). More melancholy and defeated than ever, Sam unleashes some of his most heartrending and infectious songs ever, mumbling before letting loose while the organ impassively traces its spectral, achingly sweet, hopeless melodies. A lesser, in some ways one-note Coomes, but perfectly at ease with the emotional registers that have always suited him like a glove, showing not the slightest performance anxiety and no need to match that with the electric guitar, left in its case for the occasion. On "Fordana" the leaden rhythms find their sublimation thanks to the almost mystical, hallucinatory magnetism of the organ, while the singer's ruined but sincere voice takes care to keep everything grounded in a painful earthly dimension, one that smells of broken flight and strikes an important chord.

The two filler inserts titled "The Tuccus" emphasize the album's gloomy, naive tone, a direct legacy of the now-distant Donner Party era, while the title track closes the show in the name of that same rancid euphoria, with the added touch of a dark glare destined to shatter and go mad amid the swirling spirals of the synth, matching the sound of a photographic grain being slowly sent to hell. What the film has captured is today's Coomes in his full-blown disenchantment. A proud anachronism that the more cynical may find raw, but that everyone else might well enjoy.

Here come Almost again. They've just celebrated twenty years of a career that owes much, if not everything, to the fact that it was never taken too seriously - not by its own protagonists first and foremost, nor by its (scant) audience or its (indifferent or ungenerous) critics. Originally a marital band, always a non-essential side venture to return to now and then purely for the fun of it, especially for Janet Weiss.

With Mole City (2013), the veterans of American indie-rock mark the anniversary with a double album that acts like an eraser wiped across the blackboard of their most recent output, an enthusiastic restart free of the slightest performance anxiety. It's no coincidence that this is also the record with which the Portland outfit returns to being an exclusively two-person affair, following the amicable split from the listless Joanna Bolme: a substantial streamlining of the lineup, matched by the greater fluidity of songwriting stripped of all excess. It takes only a few minutes - the debris and the atrocious distortions that meet Janet's pots and pans in the nursery-rhyme "You Can Stay But You Gotta Go" - to confirm that "Mole City" wanted to bring back the band in its most rough-and-ready dimension, a vinegary, playground kind of rock that does justice to their raw, carefree nature, resistant to any overstructuring. Here it's the imprecisions, the vocal cracks, the gravelly grime of the guitars and the boozy verve of the keyboards that make the difference, and you can stumble upon the typical melodic, skipping track à la "Field Studies", though cooked up this time according to the crooked, brutal and slapdash recipe of "Hot Shit!".

A return to the wild for the duo, laid out in trotting and sometimes embryonic vignettes, which becomes emblematic on "Fat Fanny Land" in the lovely fusion of his unhinged (and almost single-note) roxychord with her primitivist drum pounding. Little more than a sketch, about as unsophisticated as you could imagine, and one that leads straight back to their origins, to the scattershot hypotyposes of their first collection ("Early Recordings"). Blissfully tangled, tipsy, rowdy, graceless and full of life: this is Almost in pursuit of a possible second youth, and perhaps that's precisely the only credible way out of the cul-de-sac of gloom, pessimism and grayness they seemed to have gotten stuck in.

The goat ("The Goat") then becomes the symbol of a renewed inner bestiary, where the rhinoceros of "When The Going Gets Dark" had represented a kind of emotional nadir. It's a notable step back from the mighty muscular outbursts or the pop juggling of the past, but it's the fruit of a strongly deliberate expressive choice - the return of their primal insanity, the ground zero of their own music and style - which may seem less than bold and may raise some eyebrows, but deserves respect.

Amid this climate of oddball euphoria, there's also no shortage of more lunar, introverted episodes. "Chumps of Chance" is exemplary in this sense, with Sam in absolute darkness, alongside the reverberated echoes of his keyboard, delivering a melancholy soliloquy that casts an atmospheric shadow of pure unease, without dismantling the foundations of his oddball poetics. Not to mention "R.I.P.", the classic ecstatic, melancholy track (entrusted to Weiss's voice) that the two Americans have never failed to offer up, or the obsessions of "Headshrinker", a looming theatre of the absurd in which Coomes sings like a perfect outsider in his own separate world, with not the slightest intention of coming out of it.

After the boundless disenchantment, a new phase of enchantments opens up for Almost, however fragile and irreducible to the comfort of convention or good form. In the second half the album indulges those intentions and literally goes haywire, curdling like mayonnaise. Bursts of burnt romanticism and drunk-but-proud voice-and-piano passages alternate (and multiply) with tears, ugliness, noisy offal, synthetic gurgles straight out of a 60s sci-fi B-movie, autistic fragments and lysergic scrawls, simulating a logic that irremediably goes to hell.

Still illuminating is the prize package that ties an obscure spoken word passage to a saccharine refrain for the sheer pleasure of throwing you off balance ("Ice Cube in the Sun"), as are the seventies evocations and the psychedelic brochure of the song that closes proceedings ("New Western Way") before the pitch-black mist of the finale, marrying grotesque Who to Pink Floyd guitars and opening the sky to one last flight of liberating madness. Tracks like these, in the band's past, would sometimes betray just a hint of mannered decadence. On Mole City, however, that twilight streak isn't mediated by any artifice, nor driven by crowd-pleasing design. It's simply a faithful snapshot of Almost's irreducible purity.

Ten years pass before the new album Breaking The Balls Of History (2023), which is also the tenth in their discography. This certainly won't be the record to change the fortunes of a band whose concessions to pop are tied to the indie world of Pixies and Sebadoh (the melodic rainbows of the otherwise rusty "Shitty Is Pretty") or the off-key swagger of Pavement ("Doomscrollers"); rather than attempting to craft a classic pop ballad (the still rather fine "Gravity"), Almost are more at home getting their hands dirty with garage rock, now with splashes of funk and breezy little choruses à la Beck ("Nowheresville"), now with Sam Coomes riding high on reckless, retro-leaning keyboards on "Riots & Jokes", in the devil-may-care style of the glorious Delta 72. Their reckless, surreal spirit even ends up desecrating a traditional genre like the blues with a nonsensical, dissonant swagger worthy of early Soft Boys on "Rotten Wrock".

To soften the album's rough edge, psychedelic dust is scattered over the slow-dream-gaze of "Inbetweenness", imbued with a metaphysical nihilism worthy of a Zen haiku, while a faint glimmer of hope emerges from the closing "The Losers Win", a visionary vignette that seems to have sprung from the dreamlike dimension of the Flaming Lips (particularly those of "The Soft Bulletin"), in which, after a lifetime of defeats, a victory for the losers finally looms.

The (apparent?) closing optimism tempers the snapshot - ironic yet merciless, a product of the pandemic era - of these dystopian times marked by denialism and alienation ("Doomscrollers"), with the ubiquitous influence of an ever more pervasive technology reducing human beings to a button on a touchscreen ("Rotten Wrock", quoting Orwell's "1984"); yet what remains is the will not to waste a single breath ("Last Long Laugh") and to hold out with a sarcastic smirk, awaiting redemption, "breaking the balls of history" through an album that makes the perfect soundtrack for the wait for yet another impending apocalypse.

SLEATER KINNEY

Sleater-Kinney Road is a small suburban lane, lined with tall, dark fir trees and weighed down by the eternal promise of rain and fog. Every now and then a driveway opens onto a tiny prefab house, blinds drawn, with the shabby look of dirty carpets and abandoned dishes. In this remote setting, one of the thousands of Twin Peaks scattered across the edges of the United States, an extraordinary movement was born in a town of roughly thirty thousand people – a place that, at a careless first glance, might suggest nothing more than the routine bustle of an administrative center of zero historical or cultural importance. Olympia, the place in question, is in fact the capital of Washington State, in the far northwest of the country – a small outpost buried in the forest, yet capable of exerting, far beyond its own borders, the force of a movement that would transcend its "genre" and protest connotations to become a genuine social model, however limited in scope.

The story of Sleater-Kinney is in fact inextricably bound up with the phenomenon of "third-wave feminism", a kind of reactive upsurge against the constraints imposed by certain internal contradictions within the dialectic and the battles of the feminist movement of previous decades. The reclaiming of total freedom for women, starting with their relationship to their own bodies and sexuality – free of the prudishness and taboos born of intellectual posturing – finds a natural outlet in the unmediated, deliberately wild and pre-rational musical expression of the riot grrrls. A term that, today, after all the caricature-like distortions that every movement suffers over time – whether we're talking about the Spice Girls' "Girl Power" or the "angry girls" of contemporary pop, from Avril Lavigne to Pink – might sound almost cartoonish, but which back then coincided with a genuine cultural flowering built on a "Do It Yourself" ethic, one that reopened debate not only on sexist issues but also on racial ones that had never truly been laid to rest.

The momentum of this awakening would gradually fade, worn down by criticism but also by the awareness of lacking a precise goal: neither the right to vote nor equal work opportunities and legal treatment, which had been the banners of the first two waves of feminism. The battle fought by young women in the early '90s was far more complicated, aiming as it did at overturning behaviors and treatment deeply rooted in society and even within the family – and, unfortunately, still present today. But if the presence of women in rock is no longer in any way seen as a caveat, and we can therefore approach the reportage of the activity of Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss's glorious band without having to dwell too much on gender connotations, it's thanks in part to stories like this one.

(Janet Weiss)

Young rage at the heart of the upheavals of the early '90s

“SLAY-ter KEN ‘ee!!!”

There it is, the Dadaist war cry that – we can imagine – announced onstage the Fury of a peaceful war, waged with nothing but a handful of battered strings (guitar or vocal) as weapons.

Sure enough, Sleater-Kinney Road is the place where the first mutual musical "experiments" between Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein took place, in the shadow of an Interstate overpass. It's hard not to think that the place's allure was somehow sharpened by the barbaric, anarchic sound of its name.

By the time they started making music together, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were already in up to their necks in the movement born in Olympia. Both were already active on the local music scene, the former with Heaven To Betsy, the latter in the queercore band Excuse 17.

A curious but telling fact: their debut album would be born in places far removed from the pamphleteering, accusations and demonstrations that set their hometown ablaze in the winter of '94. It would be recorded over the course of a single night, at the end of a trip to Australia the two women made on their own.

Sleater-Kinney – unsurprisingly – is a raw, ramshackle, rough-edged record, perhaps shaped by the youthful idea of an unrefined punk ethic, or rather one of deliberate imperfection as proof of subversive urgency. Internalizing the lesson of Sonic Youth and channeling it into the nascent grunge of those years, Corin's still-unrefined voice kicks out amid the impassive guttural grumble of the two guitars – both reliably tuned to C sharp, so that Tucker can use hers like a bass.

You can already sense, in any case, the power of the (sub)liminal message contained in her untutored shrieks: at times the clear impression is of witnessing the helpless, desperate aggression of a trapped animal. It's an awareness that lends tangible depth not only to this debut, but also casts a distinctive light on everything the young American duo would do in the years that followed.

Sold out

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend

from “Sold Out”

They'll be joined at the start of their career by Lora McFarlane, recruited during that trip to Australia, who had already taken part in various minor outfits on the Australian and American scene between the late Eighties and the following decade.

Despite the fairly modest musical value tout court of this first effort, there remains the fascination of holding in one's hands a "historical" document — not so much of the atmosphere being breathed in Olympia at the time, but rather of the newborn relationship — not only a romantic one — between two complementary spirits. A dialogue that here is still not entirely explicit (“The Day I Went Away”), a timid mutual discovery already backed by the confidence of a promising rapport.

Indeed, that the project wasn't a passing infatuation is confirmed by the evolution achieved on the duo's second effort: Call The Doctor follows their self-titled debut by a couple of years. The common thread remains an intense, passionate punk sound, this time tackled with more structure — though still rather "easy," especially in the guitar work, where a growing confidence is nonetheless starting to take shape (see “Taste Test”, for example). A tangible expressive power, but one still confined by overly easy, within-reach devices (“I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”, “Taking Me Home”).

It's on this record, however, that some of the cornerstones of the band's experience take shape — albeit still in embryonic form: one of them is certainly the vocal interplay between Corin and Carrie, found in almost every track. Tucker's feral howl, untutored and desperately aggressive, is countered by Brownstein's sardonic smirk, as if she were pointing a gun at you while comfortably seated in an armchair, glass in her other hand — while her bandmate writhes about, splattering acid on the wallpaper and setting the carpet on fire.

The rhythmic contribution doesn't help matters, merely following the current of a record that, in the end, represents another step forward (but nothing more) on a path with a martial stride, one that's not about to run out of steam any time soon.

Their first live experiences reflect the situation of those years: on one hand, the natural, empathetic connection with the female audience, whose (free) presence at concerts was by no means a given, considering the — still today, unfortunately — macho, atavistic violence these occasions tend to unleash. Far more complicated, at first, was the reverse relationship, between Sleater-Kinney and the audience, still used to thinking of rock'n'roll as synonymous with testosterone-fuelled expression. Probably, though, all you'd need to do is ask the guy who got a microphone thrown at his head during that opening slot for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion how that turned out…

The explosion of a prefabricated coffin: Sleater-Kinney dig their own way out with their bare hands

How do you escape the spectre of a protest movement so full of meaning that it builds up enough inertia to crush the legitimate aspirations of a young band to compose, first and foremost, music? The duo's first move seems to be the smartest one: hire a drummer who had already made a name for herself outside the movement itself, while not being a complete outsider to it. And if that drummer has the relentless, magnetic touch of Janet Weiss, a syncopated wandering, fluid yet rock-solid, between kick drum and cymbals, then the job's probably mostly done.

1997 is also the year they signed with their patron label, Slim Moon's Kill Rock Stars.

The alchemical blast of Dig Me Out is striking right from the start: it's clear that with this record the band made a significant leap in personality; the trio's chemistry must have seemed electrifying to anyone who witnessed their early shows. This record also shows a palpable will to break free from the guarded punk aggression of their early days, turning it into pure, crackling rock'n'roll energy.

Razor-sharp riffs (the title track, "Words And Guitar", "One More Hour"), along with unexpected progressions steeped in nineties hallucinations ("Jenny"), show what Tucker and Brownstein had in store for the old sea dog now firmly taking the helm on this record.

This is how Sleater-Kinney don't bother concealing the record's drive toward pure entertainment, armed as they are with driving tracks like "Turn It On", "Not What You Want" and "Dance Song '97". They know that the party they've thrown crowns them queens, with the power to decide its fate and that of its guests – it may seem obvious to point out, but if you have something to say, better to say it with a good song. So it becomes easy to take the refrain of a thousand songs about women fervently perched at the windowsill, between full lips and rustling curtains (as in the sarcastic "Little Babies"), and twist it into piercing subliminal messages, set within razor-edged, motorized raids ("The Drama You've Been Craving From"). This way, feminism is no longer a flyer to be plastered on a wall: there's no longer the urgency of a message, but the smooth coherence of an innate expressiveness that bypasses the rational dissection of contexts and ideas.

Indeed, there's room, above all, for an emotional revolution that betrays very little ideological posturing, but rather the great surge of needs felt in one's own skin:

We're manufacturing hearts

We’ve got the perfect thing

The word on the street

We’ve got the new love machine

Heart with and on/off switch and a remote control

Now you can program how you feel before you walk out the door

from "Heart Factory".

By this point in their career, it's clear that Sleater-Kinney had entered the collective imagination: Spin and Rolling Stone hailed them as one of the most vital forces in contemporary rock. The press's courtship of the band would be a constant throughout their career, as journalists tried to turn them into a cultural phenomenon. Reading their name on the covers of The New York Times or Time, one might think they were dealing with a band of enormous mainstream popularity: instead, what drew attention, more than the music itself, was the ideological framework that generally overshadowed the musical content entirely – content that certainly wasn't accessible to a wider audience, so much so that Dig Me Out, despite all the critical and media buzz, sold a measly 56,000 copies.

The band's own contribution to all this was, in fact, modest, apart from holding the phone receiver up to answer the question: "What does it feel like for a woman to play rock music?".

The difficult navigation, between rocks and sirens, to reach the open sea

"A lot of what Sleater-Kinney is about has to do with the music communities we came from, with feeling part of them. [...] You can work with people you care about, and who care about you and your music at the same time, and still release records that many people have access to."

(Carrie Brownstein)

The Hot Rock isn't just the title of Sleater-Kinney's fourth album, but also a 1972 film starring Robert Redford: it tells the rollicking story of a group of thieves chasing the pure, polished diamond of a successful independence (from the title track: "An uncut stone is flawed and beautiful/ Don't try to size me down to fit your tiny hands"). The siege of the music industry must have been more than tangible, judging by Tucker's defiant outburst: “If you listen long enough, you’ll forget there’s anything else/ Tie me to the mast of this ship and of this band/ Tie me to the greater things, the people I love”. This sense of proud encirclement, rendered with a fresh and playful compositional freedom, runs through this 1999 release.

The Hot Rock, recorded over three and a half weeks – twice as long as Dig Me Out – reveals an expressive refinement that doesn't compromise the band's immediacy. Tucker's vocals continue their process of smoothing out excesses and rough edges, arriving at a more restrained but no less powerful expressiveness. This is probably a moment in Sleater-Kinney's career when they're forced to reflect on and define their place in the world – musical and otherwise. Almost a becalmed stretch of meditation after the cathartic explosion of the previous record.

This process, however, doesn't exhaust the evolutionary drive of the band's sound, which here takes shape with absolute naturalness. Shifting riffs (with Brownstein in Verlaine-esque form) and ever-evolving rhythms (Built To Spill) seem to remind us that few bands have managed to combine such irresistible explosiveness with such formal elegance as these women. Violin inserts, as in the aching ballad "The Size Of Our Love", drive the point home. This trait, besides infusing the band's music with a glamour full of refined understatement, makes listening to their records – especially from this one onward – something that transcends the era in which it was conceived.

Never as much as on The Hot Rock does the dialogue between Corin and Carrie take on such a theatrical quality, a sort of perfectly choreographed duo reading ("Get Up"). Perhaps overused a touch too much across the record, if one wants to find a flaw: the vocal parts sometimes seem to reach a saturation point. One senses the two women's need to "have their say" on certain issues, setting aside the sharp immediacy of previous records – with a few exceptions placed early in the record, such as the aforementioned "The End Of You" – and instead settling into a confident stride between unexpected poppy little leaps (as in "Banned From The End Of The World") and more introspective wanderings ("Don't Talk Like").

The dominant impression of the record is that it's the result of an intense recording session, a fortunate and natural outpouring of steadily accumulating ideas: the compositional drive is perhaps less inspired. Without ever tipping into real fussiness, there's a sense of a not-always-focused hopping about. What you're left holding is a record steeped in a certain breezy intellectual charm, one that breathes the air of an afternoon in an alternative Pacific Northwest café; its relaxed atmosphere of old, worn armchairs welcoming the laughter of old friends.

Getting their hands on the "Cattivone", the definitive album, and coming to terms with themselves

The riot grrrl movement had by then faded over the horizon, with nearly all the bands of that era disbanded, leaving the field to Sleater-Kinney, the sole survivors – sadly – of a movement that had seemed capable of changing something even on a quantitative level. So the turn of the millennium arrives, and the band's fifth album (all fairly generous in output, incidentally) in six years makes its appearance, for a band whose artistic drive has never shown any sign of wear.

From the very first arpeggio of "The Ballad Of A Ladyman" you can sense the band's amused self-awareness: All Hands On The Bad One is in fact a happy fusion of the visceral combat of Dig Me Out (just listen to "Ironclad", which could comfortably sit among that album's best tracks) and the understated, refined allure of The Hot Rock.

Feline and foul-mouthed, icy and compelling, this Sleater-Kinney record stands out above all for its seemingly accommodating pop surface – though, as ever, it knows how to land a sinuous blow to the back of the neck ("If you wanna watch me chew/ My teeth are cutting you out," Tucker sings on "Youth Decay"). Beyond the recognizable, sarcastic little hooks ("You're No Rock'n Roll Fun"), where Tucker's voice is now full and flawless and Brownstein's guitar cartwheels send you to the Moon, what makes All Hands On The Bad One superior to the trio's other – still solid – releases is its ability to grab the listener by the throat without giving up on building its own shifting, vital brand of epic.

All of this is laid bare in what is probably the pinnacle of Sleater-Kinney's career, the album's title track. The sequence of scenes unfolds with real theatrical flair: Brownstein's irresistible opening salvo, a mocking desecration of formal virtue ("Can't get to heaven in a silver spoon/ Polish everything except for the mark on you"); the acrobatic show of strength in the bridge from a feral Tucker; and finally the chorus, where the characters line up for the final act under the crash of Weiss's cymbals (a brilliant touch!).

It's almost unbelievable, the mastery, the sheer savoir-faire with which these three women from Olympia hold the listener captive in their overflowing charisma, even allowing themselves to set aside their usual whip-cracks for a moment, for a pop ballad like "Leave You Behind" ( ! ) and for sly, sideways sarcasm ("Milkshake 'N Honey").

With unprecedented clarity, Sleater-Kinney speak directly to their audience: All Hands On The Bad One contains some of the band's most explicit lyrics. The pornography of turning personal tragedy into spectacle and selling off death on TV ("Was It A Lie?"); the splendid "settling of accounts" in "#1 Must Have", moving from a stern indictment of the manipulation underlying the at-least-partial failure of the riot grrrl movement ("They took our ideas to their marketing stars/ And now I'm spending all my days at Girlpower.com") to a final, renewed call to arms in an unceasing effort to reconnect consciences (“And for all the ladies out there I wish/ We could write more than the next marketing bid/ Culture is what we make it/ Yes it is/ Now is the time to invent”); and finally the egalitarian slogan of "Male Model", believable only because of the passion behind it:

Go back and tear the pictures from the page

It's time for a new rock'n roll age

History will have to find a different face

And if you’re ready for more

I just might be what you're looking for

By this point, the band's credibility as torchbearers of rock into the new millennium is firmly established – an image people tend to shy away from, victims of a certain cynical pose, but one that clearly still holds meaning for Sleater-Kinney themselves. More than for any wobbly talk of "spirit", they were a genuine wellspring of inspiration for many bands of the new millennium: the sexual liberation of their swirling riffs, the constant glow of an emphatic vocal delivery, the powerful, earthy force of their drumming would echo here and there through many of the groups emerging on the scene in those early 2000s (Bloc Party, to name one?).

The task of carrying this legacy forward falls to One Beat, released in 2002 on the trusty Kill Rock Stars. The release date makes clear that the band, too, had to reckon with the America of those years – a country unilateral even within itself, one that confused patriotism with uniformity of thought. "Since when skepticism is un-American?", Tucker asks on "Combat Rock", and so on.

One Beat is actually a rather odd record, made up of songs that amusedly miss the mark, gleefully torturing you with glancing blows – an album whose sound is always vividly sculpted, yet lacking in standout songs. Chaos envelops the planet, and there's no clearly marked way out: that much seems to emerge from the reptilian writhing of "Oh!".

All of this coexists with the blossoming of a new sensibility, fully and knowingly at odds with what's happening around them. We catch traces of it in the rolling stones of "Light Rail Coyote", with those Hendrix-like guitar riffs boldly charting a new course: that of rock, pure and simple. To anyone who thought that, with punk, the band could get away with it without too much effort – just add a dash of feminine pride – but that they'd better not try their hand at rock, here's the answer: "Step Aside". The emotional rollercoaster between the stop-start tease of the verse and the explosion of the chorus is magnificent, with Tucker now in full command of her vibrato (finally able to shift expressiveness, as on "Prisstina"), while Brownstein leaps onto the speaker stacks in full rockstar pose.

One Beat is, at the same time, a less captivating record than the others: it slides by smoothly, and it's clear that the Sleater-Kinney formula is starting to wear thin, losing some of its unpredictability. It's easy to see what Carrie Brownstein means when she says: "I'd listen to the radio, to modern rock stations, and I'd get so worked up realizing the direction the legacy of punk and alternative rock was heading – this overly confident stuff: 'Oh, every song played on the radio has to be under three minutes. I need to know what the chorus is going to sound like before it even arrives.' Everything was so certain and so predictable. Then I'd switch to a classic-rock station, and this eight-minute track would come on that spirals into this out-of-control section, and you have no idea what might happen."

The explosive final act of a flawless career

So it's hardly unexpected that the band would split from Kill Rock Stars and sign to the heavyweight Sub Pop (which also meant the chance to make a record with bigger resources and under the guidance of an established producer like Dave Fridmann), leading to the release of The Woods, three years after its predecessor. This marks the first moment of reflection in a decade-long career, coinciding with Tucker's motherhood, in which the trio questions its own existence: but what emerges once again, ahead of any musing on the fading strength of their identity or on the inevitable wear of all that time spent together, ahead of a music world that feels fragmented and somewhat hollowed out, is the simple desire to play together.

The result will once again be a triumph, confirming Sleater-Kinney's ability to draw on uncertainty and surrounding chaos and transfigure it into something vital and personal, yet never predictable. That's exactly what comes through on the lead single, "Jumpers": a verse of hallucinated alienation, where small obsessive notes evoke flickering neon lights and the ceaseless noise of city traffic, exploding into a catharsis straight out of Zabriskie Point, first in Tucker's vertiginous scream and then in Brownstein's overflowing solo.

The Woods will probably be remembered as their heaviest record: Corin's voice stretched to the point of strain, Carrie's guitar more distorted than ever, Janet's drums echoing across rugged, vast spaces. Yet it's not "juiced up", the way a band running out of inspiration might sound. These women want to stage a pyrotechnic show worthy of their experience, and they do so with a record that combines hard-rock swagger – as in the macho incipit of "The Fox", with a guitar that sounds like it's being played with the famous coin trick and Tucker slipping convincingly into the shoes of a Robert Plant – and the dissonant, carefree pride of "Modern Girl".

Janet's drumming radiates a mighty warmth that goes beyond even her own standards; grim, feral rolls seem to come from a Kubrickian prehistory of rock, back when humankind first learned the concept of rhythm around the fire of a life-and-death ritual ("Entertain", "Let's Call It Love").

On this final record, you can feel the band's will to go all-in like a poker player, pushing away from a slow artistic fade-out, from simply settling into the inexorable passing of the years. How many bands, even among the greatest, have had the courage to pull off something like this? And there's also a sense of "going out in style" here, which is no coincidence, as it precedes the hiatus – breakup? – of the group; the band's last show will be in their hometown of Portland, Oregon, with their minds cast back to the shadow of that overpass where it all began, on August 12, 2006.

The strongest clues as to their motivations point to Tucker's calling as a mother; several times over those years she hinted that The Woods could be the band's last record. Add to that a natural weariness, which today can be found in Brownstein's "silence" (busy with alternative pursuits like blogging and acting: a comedian on Saturday Night Live and co-star in an indie film alongside James Mercer of the Shins).

And yet, something suggests the last word hasn't been said. One thing's for sure: Sleater-Kinney won't be coming back for just any old reunion show...

But using nostalgia as a launching pad is, as we know, a double-edged sword: however beautiful the old days were, they're unlikely to come back exactly as they were. And Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss certainly haven't framed their return as a quiet, friendly comeback; instead, with their characteristic sardonic boldness, they've repeatedly proclaimed just how much they've invested in their new album, Cities To Love, their first record since the hiatus that followed the release of The Woods.

Simply repeating the experience of that record – a pyrotechnic send-off, with the sound pushed over the top by Dave Fridmann and arguably the most memorable songs of their career in the strictest sense – would already have been a great achievement. The three former riot grrrls even claim they wanted to reinvent their idea of what the band could be – even though, through all their obvious evolutions and detours, they had always stayed true to themselves throughout their career.

That they're promptly proven wrong on this point is one of the most commendable things about No Cities To Love, which for the rest is an enjoyable but not especially entertaining romp, in which the trio wants to play flat-out, with no compromises – leaving listeners with a sense of overwhelming, monotonous hammering throughout the record.

Brownstein's riffs lose their elegant Television-style bite, slipping instead into a more generic, serialized mold in the vein of Black Keys, or Arctic Monkeys in their Josh Homme era ("Bury Our Friends", "Fangless"); Tucker's voice seems chained to a mid-range tonality, barely scratched by a tamed version of her trademark scream.

In short, the songwriting chops needed to let the strongly defined, distinct identities of Carrie, Corin and Janet fully shine seem to be missing; in fact, the melodic and arrangement choices often sound rather tired (the title track, "No Anthems"). Despite the attempt to mask the nostalgic nature of the whole operation, it's precisely from that nostalgia that the positive notes emerge, from those few moments when you hear more bite than bluster. Mostly, what remains is the hope of seeing them back together on stage (for many, for the first time).

For those who weren't able to see them live, a live document arrives: a live album, Live In Paris, which forever captures the show held at "La Cigale" on March 20, 2015, showing us a band in tremendous form. There's plenty of "The Woods" (4 tracks), plenty of "No Cities To Love" (just as many), but also some notable deep cuts from the more distant past, like "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone", pulled from their second album "Call The Doctor" (1996), and two tracks from the explosive "Dig Me Out" (1997). In all, thirteen tight, exciting and irresistible episodes of that healthy brand of rock'n'roll that knows how to balance sheer impact with accessibility, never once dipping in quality: a hotbed of ideas delivered in their usual three-piece setup, with no bass, one of the two guitars holding down the rhythm on the lower strings – an aesthetic that many have tried to imitate without (almost ever) managing to achieve the same results.

Two pieces of news preceded The Center Won't Hold, the ninth album by Sleater-Kinney (their first for Mom + Pop). The first was the departure of Janet Weiss, announced on social media just ahead of the release: "The band is going in a new direction and it's time for me to move on." As for this new direction, that's where the second piece of news comes in: the choice of St. Vincent as producer. A significant decision: four years after the much-welcomed comeback with "No Cities To Love", and with a storied career behind them that has crowned them champions of the wildest alternative rock, the riot girls opt for a change of direction.

Clark's touch is unmistakable: the songs are wrapped in a more synthetic, glittering sheen, delivering some of the most melodic moments of Sleater-Kinney's career. The changes are evident right from the opening, title track. Repeated metallic clangs intertwine with distortion and a build-up of voices and backing vocals: then everything gets swept away by the unstoppable drive of Corin Tucker (recently also appreciated on the second Filthy Friends album) and the rest of the instrumentation, enriched by carefully placed piano touches. In terms of performance, and of the vocal and guitar interplay between Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, these are the poppiest moments of the band's career: "Reach Out" and especially "Can I Go On" (one of the most immediately striking tracks), while the proto synth-funk of "LOVE" is the passage where St. Vincent's hand is most strongly felt. All of this – fortunately – without Sleater-Kinney giving up an ounce of their compelling energy.

"Restless" is one of the weaker passages, with the taut "RUINS" faring much better. Standing out in the tracklist are the first two splendid singles "Hurry On Home" and "The Future Is Here", joined by the thunderous "Bad Dance" to round out the trio.

Thematically the album comes across as very physical, almost corporeal. "The center can't hold" is the woman's body, the balance of every individual forced to reckon with a contemporary reality that leads to collapse: “There’s nothing more frightening and nothing more obscene/ Than a well-worn body demanding to be seen/ Fuck!”("LOVE"). It's here that the band's "mission" and their new musical dimension reach their highest point, right in the grand finale "Broken", a heartfelt piano ballad centered on the story of Christine Blasey Ford. Whether this is actually the start of a new direction, we don't know: for now The Center Won't Hold is the work in which Sleater-Kinney have experimented the most, while still delivering results worthy of their greatness.

"It's not the summer we we're promised/ It's the summer that we deserve" sing Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker on "Down The Line", toward the end of the new Path Of Wellness. It's the summer of 2020, we're in America. Covid-19 and protests in the streets while the surviving Sleater-Kinney lay the groundwork for their return. Indeed, the tenth album was conceived as a duo, without Janet Weiss, the band's longtime drummer since 1996, who left the project right around the previous "The Center Won't Hold". Self-produced by the two guitarists (a first for them), the release sees Weiss replaced by a string of session musicians from the Portland scene (the band's longtime home base, so much so that it inspired Brownstein to create the cult series "Portlandia"), among them Angie Boylan, drummer on the band's most recent live shows.

With Path Of Wellness, Brownstein and Tucker opt for a formula in which energetic, raw sounds coexist with the melodic flourishes showcased on its predecessor, marked by the much-debated production of St. Vincent. The fury of riot grrrl has by now faded, giving way to an indie-rock sound bolstered by intriguing guitar interplay, solidly backed by pulsing bass, vocal exchanges and punchy choruses.

The album was preceded by two fine singles: "Worry With You" and "High In The Grass", with a more aggressive sound and a rather psychedelic video. The forty minutes of listening unfold alternating echoes of the #MeToo movement (sketched out in the lyrics of "Complex Female Characters", buried under the fury of drums and guitars) with reckonings over the traumas of the pandemic amid the biting solos of "Tomorrow's Grave". Path Of Wellness won't go down as an essential chapter in Sleater-Kinney's catalogue, but it does present Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker once again in sync and united within this new dimension.

Little Rope is the fourth album made since the band's hiatus (2006-2014) and marks thirty years of their career. It's also the second work that no longer features drummer Janet Weiss, who had been part of Sleater-Kinney since "Dig Me Out" (Kill Rock Stars, 1997). The album is marked by the sudden loss of Carrie Brownstein's mother and stepfather in an accident that occurred in autumn 2022, while the band was working with producer John Congleton (Murder Capital, Alvvays, St. Vincent, Explosions In The Sky, Cloud Nothings). A loss that the musician herself has been able to process through music, as in "Hunt You Down" (“I forgive you, I wish I’d told you so / Nowhere for the words to go, with what’s left of me / I’ll send your ashes my love), riconducendo se stessa alla chitarra e trovando il conforto del lavoro in studio con la sua “famiglia di elezione”. It's a tragedy that arrives at a moment thick with unease about the present, a mood that permeates the entire record.

At the heart of the songs we find a range of emotional shades, from the widespread sense of loss felt after the Covid-19 pandemic to the conviction that it can be overcome together, right through to what Brownstein describes as the sense of in-betweenness between stages of life, between eras of history.

The opener "Hell" is explosive: a caustic track that reflects on violence in contemporary American society, alternating the apparent calm of the verse with the fury of the chorus. We then find the happiest results in the jittery post-punk of "Needless You Why", "Hunt You Down" and "Don't Feel Right", while the pop mid-tempo of "Say It Like You Mean It" and the rock charges of "Small Finds" and "Six Mistakes" come across as fairly colorless. The finale delivers three of the most interesting tracks, ranging from funk shades ("Crusader") to electro-pop ballad ("Dress Yourself"). Closing things out are the compressed electric guitars of "Untidy Creature", which recapture a bit of the drive of the sound of "The Woods" (Sub Pop, 2005) before dissolving into piano.

The Tucker-Brownstein duo's latest effort draws strength from a certain confidence in their own compositional and arranging abilities, a style that has been consolidated since "No Cities To Love" (Sub Pop, 2015). But the feeling that lingers, listen after listen, is that the songs on Little Rope are "settling" into a mannered pop-rock that lacks the vibration, that nervous electricity and that "hunger" that have always characterized Sleater-Kinney's music ("Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl", as the title of Brownstein's memoir suggests).

 

Donner Party: Francesco Nunziata

Almost: Stefano Ferreri

Sleater-Kinney: Lorenzo Righetto

 

Contributions from Claudio Lancia ("Live In Paris"), Alessio Belli ("The Center Won't Hold", "Path Of Wellness"), Giuseppe Rapisarda ("Breaking The Balls Of History") and Maria Teresa Soldani ("Little Rope")

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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